


Greenwich Mean Time

by provocative_envy



Series: unfinished [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Universe - Canon, Angst, Blackmail, Compromising Photographs, Drama, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Not Epilogue Compliant, POV Third Person Limited, Romance, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-04
Updated: 2015-11-25
Packaged: 2018-02-24 01:35:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 32,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2563412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/provocative_envy/pseuds/provocative_envy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>She had then gone straight to muggle London and bought a dress—bright white and backless, the sort of dress one might wear to a society function when one is single and sorry and bitter; the sort of dress designed to stand out and cause a scandal.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. like a virgin

* * *

 

Pansy Parkinson is going to wear a white dress to Draco Malfoy’s wedding.

She picks out a long, form-fitting satin sheath, side-slit cut right to the middle of her thigh—she likes the way the color contrasts with the tan she’d acquired in Corsica over the winter, likes the way the fabric stretches and shimmers across the gentle slope of her hips, likes the slide of the skinny silk straps against the sensitive skin of her bare shoulders.

She knows that Granger will scowl when she sees her, knows that Draco will sigh and Weasley will grimace and Potter will act affronted by her very existence—but Pansy isn’t wearing the dress for any of them.

Oh, no.

Her original dress—which she’d found in Paris after throwing away the bridesmaid color swatches Granger had sent her in what could only have been an utterly unfounded fit of optimism—had been a deep cobalt blue; an exact match for her eyes. It had been reasonably modest and entirely elegant, the sort of dress one might wear to a society function when one was in a long-term, committed, seemingly monogamous relationship with a respectable young man—a young man like Theodore Nott.

And since Pansy had actually _been_ in a long-term, committed, seemingly monogamous relationship with Theodore Nott at the time of its purchase, she had thought the dress was a perfectly sensible choice for the Granger-Malfoy wedding—she would look beautiful, she would blend in, and she would make Theo proud.

But then the unthinkable had happened.

Theo had gone to New York for business, run into several old school friends who’d disappeared during the final battle, and proceeded to sleep with Daphne Greengrass.

Pansy could have possibly overlooked this transgression—it wasn’t the first, after all—but ten weeks after the fact, there was a plucky, partially-starved barn owl pecking at their dining room window bearing an envelope that contained nothing but a short note and a greyed-out sonogram.

 _Twins_ , Daphne had written in lurid green ink, _I’m pregnant with twins._

The ensuing argument had been cataclysmic.

Pansy had burned the letter after Theo had left, but not before noticing, somewhat vindictively, that Daphne dotted her i’s with tiny, nauseating, curlicue hearts; the original blue dress from Paris had been pitched into the fire less than twenty minutes later.

Almost half a year has passed since then. Pansy likes to believe that she is fine, that she is coping, that she has moved on with grace and dignity and all the other rubbish Granger had so earnestly counselled her with in the aftermath of Theo’s betrayal—

Except she hasn’t moved on.

She has smoked too many cigarettes and eaten too many éclairs and she is fairly sure that she hasn’t consumed a proper vegetable in at least three weeks. She’s had more one-night-stands in recent memory than there are days in the month, and she routinely tortures herself by subscribing to the American version of _Witch Weekly_ and using thick black markers to erase Daphne’s face from all of the Page Six society reports. She has lost weight she didn’t need to lose, has traded in her coral pink lipstick for a vampy, striking shade of crimson that attracts men who are anything but respectable—she has been featured in the blind gossip column of the _Daily Prophet_ every Sunday without exception, has had the sordid  
details of her weekend exploits dissected, _denounced_ , has found the attention equal parts shameful and scintillating—

She isn’t coping.

She resents Granger and her relationship with Draco more than she will ever feel comfortable admitting, watches them bicker and fight and gaze at each other adoringly when they think no one is looking—and Pansy has not been in love with Draco for ages, has only ever cared for him like a brother since she they were sixteen, but she is _jealous_ of what he has with Granger, jealous and spiteful and angry, and she hates that, hates that she is suddenly incapable of being happy for her friends—even the truly annoying ones like Granger.

And in March, when Draco had casually mentioned to her at Saturday brunch that Theo had RSVP’d for the wedding with a plus one, she had rolled her eyes and added a dollop of fresh cream to her tea and dutifully changed the subject. She had then gone straight to muggle London and bought a dress—bright white and backless, the sort of dress one might wear to a society function when one is single and sorry and bitter; the sort of dress designed to stand out and cause a scandal.

Because she is not fine, not really, but she is an excellent liar.

She always has been.

 

* * *

 


	2. truth or dare

* * *

 

**_April 21, 2001_ **

**_8:30 pm_ **

The wedding is gorgeous.

Of course it is—Granger has impeccable taste.

Pansy sneers at the floral arrangement at the center of her table, a riotous bouquet of sunset-orange Mokara orchids, blooming like rounded pentagrams, and fire-red anthurium, petals veined with a vivid royal violet—it’s almost _too_ pretty, and if she hadn’t seen, firsthand, the five-inch thick vellum notebook that Granger had carried around for eight months, bursting at its leather seams with pamphlets and business cards and grainy sample photographs—Pansy would have assumed that Granger had paid a professional to plan the whole reception.

“Anything I can get you, miss? Champagne? Sparkling water? A cocktail?”

Pansy glances up to see a tuxedoed waiter hovering behind her chair, a black-lacquered tray of champagne flutes balanced precariously on the flat of his forearm; he’s blond, bland, and handsome. He’s also bizarrely eager to ply her with alcohol—and he looks familiar. She doesn’t recognize him.

“Do I know you?” she asks, frowning.

The waiter’s smile falters. Across the table, Harry Potter snorts into his plate of salmon pilaf.

“Something to add, Potter?” she coos, glowering at him.

Potter’s lips twitch.

“I know that with all the, ah, _socializing_ you do, it might get difficult to keep track of names, faces, prison tattoos, what have you—but _really_ , Pansy, surely you can do better than ‘ _do I know you_ ’,” he says, crossing his arms over his chest and slouching in his seat. “I’d be offended if I was him.”

She pouts.

“But you’re _not_ him, Harry,” she says sweetly, tilting her head. “I’d lock myself in a convent with a herd of stampeding manticores before my standards ever sank low enough to touch you.”

Potter’s eyes narrow, gleaming emerald green behind his glasses.

“ _Standards_ ,” he repeats. “I don’t think that word means what you think it means, Parkinson—otherwise you might not be so quick to claim you have any.”

She lifts her chin.

“Says the man who was going to propose to a _Weasley_ ,” she retorts, unable to help herself; her temper, she knows, is her least attractive quality—thank God for push-up bras. “At least I don’t take my strays home and try to _marry_ them, honestly—”

Potter’s expression turns thunderous. The waiter shuffles awkwardly; his cheeks are flushed an embarrassed, rosy pink.

“I have to—I’ll just—I’m off at ten, if you’re not…busy,” the waiter stammers, scratching the back of his neck.

“Sure thing,” she simpers, snagging a flute of champagne off his tray before he walks away.

A charged silence descends upon the table.

Pansy takes a leisurely sip of champagne.

Potter cuts into his salmon with a vicious jab of his knife.

The nearby string quartet begins to play a waltz.

“No date, then?” she asks dryly.

He huffs out an unamused laugh, dropping his fork and reaching for his vodka-tonic.

“Nott and Greengrass are here, you know,” he replies conversationally, swirling his drink; the cocktail straw bumps against the rapidly melting ice cubes, dragging along the salted rim of the glass. “And, just between us, I was _definitely_ on your side when he first cheated on you—privately, at least—but now that I’ve seen Greengrass up close, I think I might have a new appreciation for where Nott was coming from with all that—I mean, she’s not bad-looking, is she? Even though she’s pregnant?”

Pansy suppresses a flinch, gulps down the rest of her champagne, and gets to her feet, light-headed and off-balance from the effects of the alcohol.

“Jesus, Potter,” she says. “All that pining you’re pretending you’re not doing for the She-Weasel is making you even more insufferable than usual.”

He knocks back his vodka, ostensibly ignoring her.

“Bit of advice, yeah, but if you’re about to go after the bartender, I heard he’s got a boyfriend in Plymouth—you may have to settle for that waiter. But he’s young, I imagine he probably won’t mind getting that below average blowie in the pantry you’re so famous for—”

She snatches her clutch off the table—a vintage Valentino coin purse, pleated lavender silk with jet black beading along the clasp.

“I’m off, then,” she interrupts, flapping her hand in a mocking, half-hearted salute. “Later, Potter—hope your night’s shit.”

He doesn’t respond, and she slips into the crowd on the dance floor, intent on finding an exit.

She desperately needs a cigarette.

 

* * *

 

**_9:40 pm_ **

The stars are out as she perches on a rough-hewn stone bench in the shadows of the hotel veranda—stars always remind her of Hogwarts, of nights spent huddled with her telescope at the top of the astronomy tower, mapping constellations and calculating planetary orbits and giggling at Draco’s jokes. She had barely paid any attention to Potter and Granger and Weasley during those years, had thought they were little more than loud, obnoxious Gryffindors with odd reputations who couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble.

Pansy sometimes wishes that hadn’t changed.

She takes a long drag on her cigarette, fills her lungs with smoke and tar and the gritty, sour-sweet taste of tobacco—

Gemini is setting in the west.

And Potter hates her.

Potter hates her, truly, and has never bothered to make a secret of it. She knows that she was the one to advocate handing him over to Voldemort at the end of the war, and she supposes that a certain level of animosity is to be expected after something like that, but—

It _rankles_.

Because she has seen him with Granger and Weasley, has seen how he trusts them and laughs with them and is so _carefree_ with his affection; she has seen him gradually warm up to Draco, too, has seen the suspicious glint in his eye dissipate as they all began meeting for weekly dinners in Diagon Alley. And she has seen how Potter can be funny and loyal and _charming_ , has seen how he is smarter than Weasley and wisely deferential to Granger, generous with his compliments and his smiles and his money. She has seen him be polite to strangers and kind to small children, has seen him forgive nearly everyone who didn’t wind up incarcerated in Azkaban after the war—

Just not her.

She blinks, lashes heavy with mascara, and taps the end of her cigarette.

Leo and Regulus are rising on the southern horizon.

Potter’s demeanor is noticeably cold when they interact; _hostile_ , really, and while Pansy has been called myriad variations of _slut_ and _bitch_ and _traitor_ at least once by almost every mainstream media outlet since the fall of Voldemort—it is _worse_ , somehow, when it comes from Potter.

She had dismissed the death threats and the poison-laced letters and the damaging rumors about her relationship with Theo. She had used her family’s money and her father’s attorney and issued a public apology—she had said she had been afraid, which was true, and that she hadn’t understood the enormity of her actions until it was too late, which wasn’t. Because she wasn’t sorry about what she’d done to Potter. She would do it again if she had to, would not hesitate to put an _end_ to the prison that her life had become.

And when she’s at her most melancholy, when she’s drinking forty year Scotch straight out of the cut-crystal decanter and staring at the empty space in Theo’s old closet—she thinks that Potter must know that. She thinks that Potter must suspect that she does not regret what she did to him, and that he is disgusted by her. Because he is the savior of the wizarding world, the one who had been willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of the greater good, and she is the girl who had just wanted it all to be _over_.

She extinguishes her cigarette on the corner of the bench, flakes of rock quartz glowing silver against the blizzard of burning ash—

Jupiter is bright tonight.

 

* * *

 

**_11:00 pm_ **

Pansy is _drunk_.

She leans into the tall, firmly chiseled chest of the waiter whose name she’s already forgotten—Ian? Ike? _Iago_?—and she rolls her hips, tequila on her tongue and a smile on her lips, everything warm and sinuous and _blurry_ , background music spiraling into a dull crescendo as she feels big hands spread out across her abdomen, inching lower, and more than one pair of eyes lock onto the lazy grind of her body—

“Jesus, Parkinson,” Potter mutters harshly, swooping in from out of _nowhere_ , really, to yank her off the dance floor and propel her down a cramped corridor next to the bar. She stumbles over her heels, clinging to his upper arm—and _oh_ , Potter is hiding _muscles_ underneath those awful crocheted jumpers he’s always wearing—

He shoves her into a bathroom and slams the door shut behind them.

“What the _hell_ do you think you’re doing?” he demands.

She arches a perfectly plucked eyebrow and collapses against the far wall, smoothing her hands down the rumpled front of her dress; her pearl pink manicure, she notes happily, is still immaculate.

“Dancing?” she answers, biting down on her lip to contain what she is _mostly_ certain is an ill-advised bout of inappropriate laughter—he just looks so _angry_ , so _irritated_ , and there is something about Potter in a rage that she has always found funny. She concludes that it must be the hair; it’s a bird’s nest on the best of days, but after she’s had eight shots of tequila, it rather starts to resemble her old housekeeper’s herb garden that time the neighbor’s kneazle had gotten out.

“That wasn’t _dancing_ ,” he says, brushing her response off with an unfocused glare. She wonders, abruptly, how much he’s had to drink. More than her? Less? Did it matter? “That was—sex without the technicalities.”

She giggles—or snorts, she can’t rightly tell at this point—and maneuvers around him so that she can squint at her reflection in the gigantic, bronze-framed mirror hanging above the sink.

“The _technicalities_?” she echoes, inspecting the artfully smudged line of kohl drawn along her eyelid. “God, Potter, you really know how to talk dirty to a girl, don’t you?”

He clenches his jaw, posture stiff in his neatly tailored, dove-grey suit—his shoulders are _distressingly_ broad, and a single wilting yellow carnation is tucked next to his ivory pocket square. She wants to ask him who had put it there. A flirtatious waitress? A weepy, grossly nostalgic Granger? The She-Weasel, perhaps? Was the She-Weasel even in attendance? There had been a marked lack of tacky red hair at the ceremony earlier—

“I swear to God, Parkinson, you—” He breaks off, glancing at the exposed skin of her back, forehead creased in a frustrated frown, and then he continues in a lower voice, “You know quite well what you were doing out there. And I won’t let you do this to Hermione. Not today.”

She dabs at her mouth with the tip of her ring finger, lipstick a glossy, dramatic burgundy that she’d specifically chosen to set off the shards of blue in her eyes—and she notices his gaze track the movement, his pupils dark and dilated, and she wants to laugh at that, wants to take advantage of him and taunt him about it and fucking _revel_ in this microscopic crack in his composure—

She hiccups.

Her mouth floods with the taste of lime and salt and the sweat she’d licked off of the nameless waiter’s navel at the bar.

“And what does me dancing have to do with Granger?” she asks with clumsily feigned innocence—because she is aware of who she is, after all, is aware of _precisely_ what it is that people have not-so-discreetly been saying about her since Theo had left for America; Potter, though, tends not to prevaricate. Sometimes she likes that about him.

“Quit it,” he snaps, combing a hand through his hair; his bowtie is hanging loose around his neck, a splattered stain of something syrupy marring the starched cuff of his collar. “I put up with Malfoy’s stupid little Slytherin games because he makes Hermione happy—God knows how—but I don’t have to extend the same courtesy to _you_.”

She smirks, toying with the three-quarter carat diamond studs in her ears. His eyes flash, and his hands bunch into fists, and she has the wild, slightly fuzzy realization that he is—not entirely unattractive.

God, how _ludicrous_.

“Oh, I don’t know, Potter,” she replies, running her tongue over the cushion of her lip, inwardly flustered but unwilling to show weakness. “I imagine I could make you _just_ as happy as Draco makes Granger—and in much the same fashion, too.”

He grits his teeth.

“No, thanks,” he replies coolly, “I didn’t bring any disinfectant with me.”

“And they say that chivalry is dead,” she drawls, deliberately tracing the border of her dress’s plunging neckline, fingernail catching on the fabric around her breasts.

He audibly swallows.

“Self-preservation, more like,” he retorts, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose and shaking his head. “If I’m going to go where the dirtier half of London’s already been, I’d prefer not to catch anything on my way out.”

She scoffs.

“Aw, keeping tabs on me, Potter?” she asks, swaying unsteadily as she saunters to the door—but her heels are too high, her center of gravity too out of sorts, and she lists to the side, tripping over the hem of her dress—

He grabs her elbow, palm callused and warm and _rough_ against her arm, and stops her from falling. His chest grazes the back of her shoulder. She has never been so close to him before. And she doesn’t—and she _can’t_ —

He doesn’t let her go.

“Don’t go back out there, Pansy,” he says, breath moist against her neck. “Hermione deserves for today to be about _her_ , not you and whatever bloody third-string quidditch player you’re trying to shag in the coat closet.”

She inhales sharply; he smells like vodka and spearmint and sandalwood, and she isn’t sure which scent is more intoxicating—but she’s dizzy with it, whatever it is, and she registers her heartbeat skipping faster as his grip tightens around her arm.

“I don’t shag quidditch players,” she replies, quiet and tense. “They have terrible stamina.”

She hears his shirttails rustle as he shrugs off his jacket.

“Don’t think you had that rule at Hogwarts,” he muses, brushing a fingertip down the notches of her spine.

She considers turning around, if only to startle him, but—

The air around them feels swollen with possibilities, with all the potential for chaos, and her brain is drowning in tequila, mental circuits shorting with a fizzle and a pop and an electric hum of static and white noise—she can’t process what she suspects is about to happen, can’t wrap her mind around six months of bad decisions culminating in such _spectacular_ disaster—and with _Potter_ , Harry Potter, because he _loathes_ her and she detests him and she likes sex, she does, it’s easy and it’s distracting and it’s _fun_ , but Potter— _Harry Potter_ , God—he isn’t easy and he isn’t fun and he will _ruin_ this for her, she can already tell, and she will regret him, she will regret this, and she will buckle under the weight of his disdain and she will _survive_ , yes, she will always survive, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t _hurt_.

This is a bad idea.

She doesn’t leave.

“What are you doing?” she asks, frozen and hesitant and _lost_. “I said I would never touch you, didn’t I? Was I somehow _unclear_?”

His hands are gliding over the straps of her dress, avoiding her skin, fluttering around her waist and her ribs and her hips, not making contact but _so close_ , too close, and she has never—not _Potter_ —

“You said you’d lock yourself in a convent with a herd of stampeding manticores before touching me, yes,” he confirms, and the confidence in his voice, the catch of his knuckle on the satin seam underscoring the curve of her breasts, it _confuses_ her, liquefies the muscles in her abdomen and causes an inescapable tremor of _want_ to rock the foundations of her denial.

“And so I’ll ask you again— _what_ are you doing?” she manages to croak.

He spins her around slowly, gently, as if to emphasize the fact that he is not forcing her to move—and his face, when she finally sees him, is almost scarily unfamiliar, his lips parted and slick, his eyes a brilliant searing green, intent and heavy-lidded and _calculating_ , and his palm settles on the small of her back, anchoring her, and she doesn’t _understand_ , she can’t—she doesn’t—it’s _Potter_ , for fuck’s sake—

“I don’t see any manticores here, Pansy,” he murmurs, tone challenging, fingers drumming a tenuous, arrhythmic pattern against the cleft of her backside, right where the lining of her dress cuts off. “Do you?”

She pauses.

“No,” she whispers.

He grins, and it isn’t nice or comforting or even particularly _happy_.

And then he’s kissing her, and she—

She hadn’t been expecting that.

His lips rove and snap and tug at hers, hard and unforgiving and with an undercurrent of aggression that should not astonish her as much as it does—and he tastes _bitter_ , tangy, like alcohol and self-destruction, and his tongue sweeps through her mouth like it’s on a mission, curls around her teeth and licks at her soft palate, tickling, _tingling_ , and none of this should be appealing, none of this should be _arousing_ , but she's kissing _Harry fucking Potter_ , she's got her nails in his hair and his hand jammed down the back of her dress, kneading her arse and yanking her hips closer to his, and he’s groaning, broken and low, and it’s reverberating through her chest as his fingers delve deeper, arching around the underside of her knickers, scraping at the lace and eliciting a semi-embarrassing keen from the top of her throat—

“ _Fuck_ , Parkinson," he says, guttural and fierce, and there's something unsettling about the way he's saying her name, a jarring rendition of the syllables that makes her shiver and makes her _stop_ and she’s pulling away, less than a fraction of an inch, until she sees that his glasses are askew and his lips are bruised and his eyes are glazed and he is _identical_ to a hundred other boys that she's seen in exactly the same state, he is not different, he is not special, and her stomach drops and her pulse slows down and the disappointment is _paralyzing_ , truly, but there is a cold-hot shockwave coiling down her spine as he pushes his thumb into her clit and she decides that she doesn’t care, she’s done this a thousand times and she’ll do it a thousand more and then he's latching onto her collarbone, teeth digging into her skin as if he wants to leave a mark, and that—

“No,” she says, voice crumbling under the pressure of his mouth. “Don’t—no marks.”

His fingertips are dipping inside of her, teasing, dragging, and he flicks his wrist, changing the angle, and she gasps, the muscles in her neck going lax, head lolling back, and he chuckles, incisors playfully pinching at the wing of her clavicle.

“Really? No souvenirs?” he asks, tugging her dress up, bunching the skirt around her waist, guiding her to the granite counter.

She has a lie to employ for this exact scenario, an awful exaggeration about allergies and cosmetics and her delicate, porcelain-soft complexion—but he’s spreading her thighs, dropping to his knees, nibbling at the spot above her knee and twisting the front of her knickers around and around, lace tearing and elastic stretching, harder and harder and harder until they just—

_Rip._

“I don’t…I don’t like them,” she says honestly, gripping the edge of the counter as he noses at the line of her pelvis. “Marks. Bruises. I don’t like—seeing them. The next day.”

And he freezes for a moment—half a moment, fuck, _less_ than that, really—and he looks up at her from between her legs, as if he’s _searching_ for something, brow furrowed and breath ragged, _hot_ , as it gusts out against her inner thighs, and she wonders absently, hazily, about what he thinks he knows about her now, what he thinks he heard and what he thinks she meant—

But then he shifts, shuts down, and he’s holding her gaze and his lip is curling up at the corner and his tongue is swirling a slow, agonizingly light circle around her clit, a threat and a promise and this is _new_ , it has never been like this, and she shudders and she pants out a garbled mess of words that might be his name and a plea and she was right, she was right, he is _ruining_ this—and he’s devouring her, truly, his mouth wide open and his tongue darting in and around and his teeth graze her clit and his fingers are fucking inside of her and she is trembling and she is frantic and she feels the first stirrings of an orgasm swelling and sweltering and she was _wrong,_ she was wrong, she can’t survive this, no, and then he makes a sound, a low-pitched groan that buzzes and vibrates through her skin and she is flying and she is breaking and she is _wrecked_ —

“—fuck, that was—can I just—” he’s saying when she floats back to reality, his hands scrabbling at his belt, shoving his trousers down to his knees, cock a thick, rigid line behind the cotton of his boxers. “ _Pansy_ , please—”

He wants to fuck her.

She stares.

Harry Potter wants to fuck her.

“Yeah,” she says, bemused and curious and maybe, she reasons quickly, maybe it’s the tequila, maybe it’s the lingering strain of her orgasm pulsing deep and deeper in her abdomen—maybe, _maybe_ , and she pulls on the front of his shirt, dragging him into another kiss—

His chin is sticky.

He tastes like her.

A thrill of anticipation shoots through her gut.

And then the fat, flared head of his cock is bumping against her clit, slipping and nudging and she feels the muscles in his shoulders ripple as he holds himself back.

She scoots forward on the counter.

She wraps her legs around his waist.

She crosses her ankles and she lifts her hips and his cock slides inside—

He goes slow. He stops kissing her. He breathes into her mouth, eyes closed and face tense, and she savors the lack of friction, the stillness, the overwhelming sensation of being full and filled and _fraught_ —

“ _Fuck_ ,” he grits out hoarsely, and she _consumes_ the word, lets it soak into the pad of her tongue in flavors of tart and tarnished, and she digs the spikes of her stilettos into the meat of his back and swivels her hips, urging him to move, and he says, “I’m not—not going to last—”

And then he’s rocking into her, pulling and pushing and pounding, and the slap of their skin is wet, arresting and filthy, _abrasive_ in the quiet of the bathroom, and he has one hand on her hip, squeezing roughly, and another resting above her cunt, fingers framing the nub of her clit as he watches, seemingly entranced, as his cock moves in and out, pelvis slamming into the cradle of her thighs, and there’s still some small part of her that is trying to rationalize what’s happening and justify her decision to fuck _Potter_ , of all people, but that thought is distant and dim and he feels too _good_ and she isn’t going to come again, no, but that doesn’t matter and she doesn’t care and—

He comes with a stutter of his hips and a hiss between his teeth.

“Sh-shit,” he gasps, slumping forward, the outer rim of his glasses digging into her arm. He holds onto her hips for another few seconds, and she thinks she feels his hands press harder against her skin, briefly, almost unnoticeably—

He clears his throat.

He steps back.

The air goes cold—

And the door flies open.

The flash of a camera illuminates the space between them, highlighting Potter’s hand on the zipper of his trousers and the swath of white fabric stretched out across her naked thighs—

She shields her eyes.

The photographer dashes off.

Neither of them move.

“Shit,” she says, strangely detached from the panic that she’s _intellectually_ aware she should be feeling.“That’s going to be—everywhere.”

Potter is gaping at her, at the tattered lace of her knickers still balled up on the floor. His expression is blank.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he blurts out, nonplussed.

She slides off the counter, heels clacking loudly on the marble tile; her legs are wobbly, and there is a faint sheen of sweat pooling between her collarbones.

“Yeah,” she agrees. She’s dazed. She’s _numb_. “Fuck.”

 

* * *

 


	3. disassembly required

* * *

 

**_April 22, 2001_ **

**_11:00 am_ **

Pansy wakes up alone.

She rubs the apple of her cheek into her gold-tinted, Egyptian linen pillowcase. Her sheets are cool against her bare calves, sleek and smooth and sensuous, and her Slytherin quidditch jersey is rucked up around her waist, threadbare cotton soft in her palms as she tugs it back down. Her hair is loose around her shoulders. Her breath is stale. She wants a cigarette, and maybe a glass of grapefruit juice, but—she’s comfortable. Languid.

She yawns.

She rolls over, limbs sprawled out, and wipes at the bits of clumped-up, day-old mascara accumulating in the corners of her eyes. She can hear the grandfather clock in the hallway ticking like a metronome, ominous and slightly grating, and the faint roar of London traffic as engines sputter and brakes squeal. Her bedroom is dark, mint green walls shrouded in grey-black shadows, and her ivory jacquard curtains are knotted shut, a thin sliver of sunlight peeking in from behind. She can see what looks like the outline of a bra hanging from the drunkenly tilted shade of a nearby standing lamp.

She squints at the ceiling.

She massages the underside of her jaw.

She has a headache.

Her arm flops to the left, boneless and limp, and she rummages around the surface of her bedside table for a bottle of aspirin. She unscrews the lid. She shakes out three pills. She swallows them dry.

She _really_ wants a cigarette.

A loud knock sounds from downstairs, followed almost immediately by the repeated, incessant ringing of her doorbell.

She winces.

She seriously considers ignoring whoever’s there—after all, Draco and Granger had left for France the previous evening, and, outside of them, she has very few remaining friends—

“ _Parkinson_!” a male voice yells in between knocks. “We need to talk!”

She bolts upright.

Why would _Potter_ be—

She remembers.

She remembers.

She remembers, and her stomach lurches.

“Just a minute!” she calls out. She looks down at her legs. Her shirt is gigantic, falling a few inches past her thighs as she stands up, and her feet are encased in a pair of chunky, grey wool crew socks. She searches fruitlessly for a headband on her way out of the room, fingers catching in the tangled ends of hair. She shrugs. At least she’s wearing knickers.

The knocking intensifies when she starts down the stairs.

“Parkinson!” Potter shouts. “Open the bloody door or I swear to God I’ll—”

She purposely drags her steps; Gryffindors were always so needlessly _dramatic_.

“—get a warrant and break the fucking locks myself—”

She rolls her eyes.

She heaves open the door.

Sunlight streams onto the imported Brazilian rosewood floor of the foyer.

“What?” she snaps, glaring at Potter; he’s pale, hastily dressed, jeans baggy and t-shirt wrinkled. “I’ll hex you from here to bloody _Cornwall_ if you don’t have a good reason for getting me out of bed before noon on a Sunday. You didn’t even bring _pastries_.”

He appears startled for a brief moment, brilliant green eyes wide behind his glasses.

“You didn’t—you didn’t get one?” he asks, voice cracking.

Her irritation sharpens.

“Get one of _what_?”

He scratches the back of his neck, glancing furtively around the street.

“Look, can we just…” he trails off.

“Oh, my _God_ , spit it _out_ ,” she interrupts, stooping down to pick up the Sunday edition of the _Prophet_ ; one of Potter’s footprints is plastered across the front page, wet and weirdly muddy, rendering the headline illegible. “Is this about the photo? Which page is it on? Is it bad? Is there cellulite?”

She flips through the dry pages, newspaper rustling. There’s an editorial spread on the Granger-Malfoy wedding, a trio of tasteful headshots depicting key points of the ceremony itself—Granger arriving at the end of the aisle, nervously biting her lip and smiling shyly, Chantilly lace veil pushed back; Draco’s face upon seeing her for the first time in almost twenty-four hours, ever-present smirk softening into something small and private, so different from the smug grin he’d worn earlier in the day; a final, candid shot of the two of them in profile, foreheads pressed together, Granger’s nose wrinkled as she tries not to laugh, white sugared icing smeared across their chins and Draco’s hands cupping her jaw.

They look so _happy_.

And she knows that they deserve it, truly, and she knows that they struggled in the beginning, knows that their entire relationship had begun while Draco was still in Azkaban and Granger was still with Weasley and that none of it had been _easy_ , no, but—

It isn’t _fair_.

Draco had gotten Albus Dumbledore killed. Draco had _lived_ with fucking Voldemort. Draco had taken a Dark Mark and Draco had actively fought against Potter and Draco had run away before the final battle was even _done_. Yet Draco’s sins had been all but washed away as soon as Granger had signed her Azkaban visitor’s badge.

Pansy’s heart twists.

She never feels more like the traitor everyone believes her to be until she thinks about Granger and Draco and realizes how much she wants to blame them for everything that’s gone wrong.

She looks back at the _Prophet_.

Directly below the wedding spread, there’s a small picture of Theo and Daphne Greengrass; his jacket’s unbuttoned, and he’s sipping from a tumbler of whiskey, cheeks flushed and teeth gleaming. Daphne is heavily pregnant in an eggplant purple dress with thick straps and an empire waist. Her arm is looped around Theo’s waist, face tilted up as she whispers in his ear. Their body language is comfortable. They look—content.

Pansy’s mouth floods with something sour.

“—not _there_ ,” Potter’s saying, anxiously twining a loose thread from the bottom of his t-shirt around his index finger—he can’t possibly have any blood circulating, not with his skin so pinched and white along the edges—

“What?” she asks, belatedly.

Potter seems agitated, and she watches as the thread—navy or black, she can’t quite tell—burrows even deeper into the fleshy pad of his finger.

“Are you listening to me?”

She cocks her head to the side. The seam sewn around the hem of his shirt is dimpling, fabric turning lumpy and uneven—

“No,” she answers honestly, “not really. Are you saying anything interesting?”

His chin falls forward onto his chest and the thread around his finger loosens, sluggishly unwinding as it flutters away.

“Christ,” he mutters, motioning tiredly to the entry hall behind her. “Let me in, yeah? I have to show you something, and as sure as I am that your neighbors are used to seeing strange men _leaving_ your flat at all hours of the morning, they might get curious about one of us _arriving_ without the benefit of a post-shag walk of shame.”

She sighs, headache returning, and steps aside. She doesn’t bother to mention that she has never taken anyone home before—he won’t care, and she can do without the inevitable joke he’d make about seedy motel rooms and back alley blow jobs. Potter isn’t half as clever as he thinks he is.

“What’s this about?” she asks, kicking the front door shut.

His posture is stiff when he turns to look at her again.

“Not quite what I was expecting,” he says, nodding jerkily at her shirt.

Her eyes narrow at the awkward change of subject.

“Oh? What were you expecting, then? A satin corset and crotchless knickers?”

He sneers.

“Considering your reaction to Ginny rejecting my proposal was to point out that you spent more on lingerie in a _month_ than I had spent on all the diamonds in her ring…yeah, I was expecting a bit more out of your sleeping attire, Parkinson.”

“Think about my _sleeping attire_ often, do you?” she coos.

She relishes the stain of red that splashes across his face, vivid and stark.

“Whose jersey is that, anyway? Malfoy’s?” he demands.

She snorts.

“Marcus Flint’s, not that it’s any of your business,” she responds curtly. “But what are you doing here, Potter? How do you even know where I live?”

He scrubs his hand down the scruff of his jaw.

“Shagged him, too?” he deflects.

Abruptly, she needs a cigarette; she reaches around him for the pack she keeps in the antique Georgian chesterfield, hand-rolled with a custom blend of tobacco and lavender.

“What does it matter if I have?” she asks, tapping out a floral-scented cigarette with an exasperated snap of her wrist—because she’s never shagged Marcus, will likely never have the opportunity to now that he’s shacked up with Zabini in Notting Hill, but Potter’s infuriating assumptions about her sexual history are _needling_ in the worst way.

“It doesn’t,” Potter insists, directing a petulant scowl at her knees. One of her socks has drooped down her leg, bunched up like an accordion around the fine bones of her ankle. She feels oddly vulnerable under the force of his gaze. She hates it.

“Don’t think I didn’t notice you avoided explaining how you managed to find my flat,” she says, striking a match within the cocoon of her hands and lighting up her cigarette. “Which is, admittedly, much less relevant than _what you’re doing here in the first place._ ”

His lips tighten as he watches her take a drag, smoke curling out in a white-grey cloud and filling the space between them with subtle notes of anise and licorice, dandelion and chocolate, bitter and sweet and intoxicating.

“Someone took a picture of us last night,” he eventually says, reaching into the pocket of his trousers and pulling out a crumpled, industrial yellow envelope. “Which you know. You were there. You saw them do it. And I thought—I was anticipating that picture being plastered across the front page of the _Prophet_ this morning, but it wasn’t. Instead, I had this parcel waiting at my garden window when I went down for tea.”

Curious, she puts out her cigarette in a porcelain ashtray and, with a skeptical quirk of her eyebrows, takes the envelope from him. Inside, there is a single glossy photograph and a plain sheet of parchment. She flounces through the mahogany archway that leads to her kitchen, stopping at her breakfast table, and lays the contents of the envelope flat, eyes instantly straying to the photograph.

And the picture is—

Well, it’s worse than she thought it’d be.

Her knickers are an obvious bundle of skimpy black lace in the foreground, forgotten on the floor, and Potter is standing damnably close to her, her legs still spread and her dress still up. His body is turned the slightest bit towards the camera, stance defensive, _possessive_ , the ninety-degree bend in his elbow shielding her naked thighs from the frame—and his trousers are clearly undone, his belt buckle resting loose against his front pocket. There is something unfailingly _intimate_ about their position, their expressions—kiss-stung lips and heavy-lidded eyes—about the slope of her arm as she holds onto his shoulder, the point of her heel pressed into the dip of his lower back.

They look like they’re—

She swallows, wishing she still had her cigarette.

She then resolutely turns her attention to the parchment. The letter itself is short, only a few sentences typed out in a bold-faced font:

 _Mr. Potter_ —

_I will require £50,000 to keep the enclosed photograph private. Contacting the authorities will result in immediate publication. Leave the required sum in the form of an unmarked cashier’s cheque in the napkin dispenser of the second window-facing table from the right at Florean Fortescue’s Diagon Alley location. You have 72 hours._

It’s unsigned.

“Well?” Potter asks as she finishes reading. He’s fidgeting.

She turns the picture over. She doesn’t want to look at it anymore.

“ _Well_ ,” she says tartly, moving towards the kitchen, “there isn’t any cellulite.”

Several seconds of stunned silence pass.

“You can’t be—God, you’re _serious_ , aren’t you?”

She pulls down a powder blue coffee mug from the cabinet above the sink.

“I don’t know what you want me to say, Potter,” she replies, filling the mug with tap water. She isn’t thirsty, not really, but she can’t stay still. “You’re being blackmailed. It all seems fairly straightforward.”

“Only a bloody Slytherin would think that _blackmail_ is straightforward,” he mutters under his breath.

She crosses her ankles and clutches her mug in both hands.

“It _is_ straightforward,” she says bluntly. “See—one party acquires leverage over another party and chooses to exploit that leverage by demanding a time-sensitive transference of money, goods, or services. It’s hardly a complicated arrangement.”

His lip curls.

“Yeah, thanks for that, but I happen to understand how blackmail works.”

She hums, off-key and thoughtful.

“Then _why are you here_?” she asks with deliberate enunciation.

He stares at her, expression torn between bewilderment and annoyance.

“Because I don’t want that picture to get out?” he answers, tone lilting and sarcastic. “Because I assumed that you were _also_ being blackmailed and figured it might be a _good idea_ to find out what you wanted to do about it?”

“Except I’m _not_ being blackmailed,” she says. “And even if I was—I wouldn’t _do_ anything about it. Who cares if this picture gets published? As subpar as the sex was, it’s not like I haven’t been previously caught in _far_ more compromising positions. This is… _tame_ , rather.”

He snorts derisively.

“ _Subpar_ ,” he says, stalking over to the kitchen island and swiping an impatient hand through his hair. “ _Really_.”

She takes a nonchalant sip of water.

“ _That’s_ what you’d like to focus on?” she taunts. “ _Really_.”

He props his elbows on the counter and leans forward, into her personal space. She looks away from the play of muscles in his forearms, corded and wiry and unquestionably strong. He isn’t much taller than her—a few inches, at most—but there’s a _solidness_ to his body that she likes; she feels delicate in comparison, safe and soft and protected. She shifts uncomfortably at the thought.

“ _Regardless_ ,” he grits out, flicking his eyes away from hers. “I don’t want this picture getting out—unlike _you_ , I’m not too keen on having my private life put on display for the whole of wizarding London.”

She arches an eyebrow.

“ _Oh_ ,” she says dryly. “And is that why you did an interview with Colin Creevey last August where all you did was gush about how _in love_ you were with the She-Weasel?”

“Don’t _call_ her—that was a favor,” he replies, jaw clenched. “His magazine’s a start-up, you know that. And he needed the exposure. That isn’t— _this_ isn’t like that, anyway. This is…what we…it’s very out of character for me. It’ll be talked about. For awhile. I don’t—I don’t want the scrutiny. Especially after—Ginny.”

Her mug clatters as she plops it on the counter.

“Out of character,” she repeats, disbelievingly. “Mm, yes, because all you do-good Gryffindor types are impervious to my wiles.”

He rocks back on his heels, incredulous.

“You think this is about my _ego_ ,” he says. “You think this is about—embarrassment?”

“I don’t know,” she admits, careful to keep her voice even. “But I’m really failing to see how this photograph could possibly be worth fifty thousand quid to you. Who cares if we shagged? We’re adults. Neither of us are in relationships—it isn’t as if it’s really that outrageous.”

His mouth turns down at the corners.

“Pansy,” he says, slow and dangerous, “why did you sleep with me last night?”

She drums her nails against the granite, fighting the urge to pick up the black, cat-shaped ceramic salt shaker sitting next to her toaster. It had been a gag gift from Draco after Theo had officially moved out; _if you’re going to wind up alone with forty cats, you might want to get a head start_ , Draco had said with his customary tactlessness. She had slapped him. He had let her. A matching tea towel had shown up the very next weekend.

“Tequila,” she tells Potter flatly. “Proximity. A heretofore undiagnosed brain injury. Take your pick.”

“No,” he argues, “those were all contributing factors, but they weren’t the _reason_.”

She scoffs, reaching up to comb her fingers through her disheveled hair, separating it into three roughly even sections.

“Oh?” she asks scathingly. “ _Do_ enlighten me, Potter—I had no idea you were such an expert on my thoughts and feelings.”

He watches as she begins to braid her hair; his expression is difficult to decipher, and she’s irrationally bothered by that.

“You knew you were causing a scene at Hermione’s wedding,” he says. “You knew that if you went back out there without me, you’d find that waiter, probably just to spite me, and you’d do something that would take attention away from Hermione. You shagged me because you didn’t trust yourself enough not to ruin her night.”

She methodically yanks at a stray strand of hair, coiling it around the end of the braid to keep it in place.

“You’re grasping,” she snarls.

“No, I’m not,” he insists. “You’re selfish, but you saw how much she put into that wedding—”

“ _Still grasping_ ,” she interjects loudly. “Why do you think I require a _reason_ to sleep with anyone? God, it’s just _sex_ , it isn’t as if we have to talk about it, or do it again, or—”

“We _could_ have not had to talk about it,” he says, anger creeping into his voice, “if I wasn’t currently _being blackmailed_ with—”

“Which doesn’t have a thing to do with these mysterious _motives_ I must have had for fucking you,” she retorts, talking over him. “ _Christ_ , Potter, the picture isn’t even _explicit_ , what does it _matter_ if it gets out—”

“What does it—you think I want the whole bloody world to know about—about what I did with _you_? Of all people?”

Her mouth snaps shut.

She registers rage and shame and blistering humiliation simmering slow and molten beneath the surface of her skin—and this, _this_ , this is why she despises Potter, this is why she avoids him at parties and doesn’t make eye contact at Friday dinners and pretends he is not _there_ the great majority of the time—

No one has the power to make her feel quite as small and insignificant as Potter does. She has never wanted to examine that fact too closely, and she doesn’t want to now, either, doesn’t want to delve any farther than she has to into this particular rabbit hole—

But she can still recall the burning sting of Theo’s parting words after the breakup— _not worth the effort, Pansy, you’re a fucking disaster_ —and the stagnant, booming echo of the front door as it slammed and rattled and shook the house. She can recall the stale, lukewarm mess of an uneaten dinner—roast pheasant with a port wine reduction and rosemary mashed potatoes—and the chip in her thumbnail from where she’d grabbed onto the cast-iron fire poker too quickly.

They’re awful memories, sharply etched and deeply defined; and yet she is secretly so very _proud_ of them, of what they represent, can sort through the rubble of her relationship with Theo and recognize the moment when she had had _enough_ , when she had demanded more from him and refused to compromise and _finally_ regretted allowing him to think that he had won for so long, for _too_ long—

They’re awful memories, yes, but they’re _hers_ ; she failed everyone but herself, and she wonders if there isn’t something wrong with her, truly, because she _prefers_ it like that.

And Potter—Potter’s condescending glances and harsh laughter and snide commentary—it cuts in a way that Theo’s absence never has. It’s potent. It’s suffocating. It chips at her resolve, causes her to question and stammer and _stall_ , and she isn’t that girl, she _isn’t_ , she isn’t the girl who cowers and she isn’t the girl who cries and she isn’t the girl who stays quiet until she _can’t_ , no—

She clears her throat.

"Thought you weren’t embarrassed,” she says, tone brittle.

The skin between his eyebrows furrows in a frown.

He moves closer, though, circles around the side of the island to stand directly next to her, hip to hip. She turns away, angling her body so that their elbows are touching but she doesn't have to see his face when he says—

“It isn't...I didn’t mean…I was planning a trip to Italy, to see Ginny,” he says, voice oddly muted in the heavy, oppressive silence of the kitchen. It isn’t an apology, and it isn’t quite an explanation, but she hadn’t been expecting either. Not really.

“So you want the She-Weasel to assume you've been living like a monk since she fucked off to the Continent? _Really,_ Potter? Isn’t she dating Viktor Krum now?”

He twitches, hunching forward slightly, and she feels the scratching drag of his jeans as his ankle brushes hers. The digital clock on her stove reads 11:37. She trains her gaze on the blinding green break between the top and bottom halves of the 7—she can’t fathom the point of it.

“Yeah,” he says noncommittally, "she is. But—either way, I'm guessing that, ah, shagging you in the bathroom at Hermione's wedding isn't going to impress her."

Pansy’s nostrils flare.

“Well, look on the bright side, Potter," she drawls, tamping down the confusing miasma of emotions that she’s positive she doesn't want to apply any labels to; still, she recognizes resentment and she recognizes jealousy and she recognizes _fear_ , too, which— _fuck_ , she needs another cigarette. She pauses. She forces herself to say, "At least you probably didn't get me pregnant.”

She smirks grimly as he whips his head around to gape at her.

“What—aren't you...on something? I didn't—I was a little—I was _distracted_ , Christ, _you_ are distracting, Parkinson, please tell me you're on—”

She nudges him with her shoulder a bit harder than strictly necessary.

“You know that herd of manticores that was inexplicably absent from the bathroom last night?” she asks, glancing out the bay window above the sink; the glass is clean, pristine, winking with a sheen of rainbow colored prisms as the sun hits it head-on. “Yeah, I'd sooner choose to reproduce with one of _them_ than I would with you, Potter. Quit worrying.”

He relaxes, sort of, but remains tense as he mumbles—

"I'm going to pay the blackmailer.”

Her spine prickles with awareness as he shifts against her.

“Yeah?" she replies.

“Yeah,” he says somberly. “The money isn't an issue, and I—even if I wasn't hoping for—you don't deserve the...it would be bad for you,” he finishes, stumbling over the words. “The attention. It would be fifty times worse than anything else you've had to deal with, especially since—well, since it's me, and it's you, and after everything—”

“Ah, yes, the traitor and the savior, working out their issues with _orgasms_ while their closest friends get married,” she simpers, voice dripping with disdain. “You're being ridiculous, Potter—no one will care. It's a wedding. People get drunk and make bad decisions at weddings. It isn't shameful unless you let it be."

He’s quiet for a second, a low, hesitant sound emerging from the back of his throat, aborted and bitten-off.

“It isn't—it isn't just about that,” he hedges. "What will Hermione and Malfoy say? You and I...Hermione might think…”

She peers at the small flower box of fresh herbs sprouting on the window sill—there’s basil and thyme and oregano, fragrant green leaves with pine-scented stems in loamy brown dirt.

“Hermione is smarter than you and I combined,” she says drolly. “Twice over, even. You’re dafter than Weasley after a pint of firewhiskey if you think she isn’t going to figure out what we did—might as well send her an owl now, actually.”

She hears him wipe at his mouth, saliva sticking to his fingertips with a slick, wet slide of lips and skin.

Heat blossoms across her scalp.

“So—what, you just want to ignore all of this until it gets printed it in the _Prophet_?” he asks, frustration evident. “Admit defeat? Not even _try_ to keep it hidden?”

She glowers.

“ _I'm_ the one admitting defeat?” she demands. “Oh, _honestly_ , Potter, _you’re_ the one who showed up this morning in a veritable _tizzy_ , yeah—you haven't given _any_ of this any real thought, you’re just— _reacting_ and impetuously jumping to do this—this _person’s_ bidding without any tactical planning whatsoever—”

“I was _not_ in a _tizzy_ —” he interjects, seething.

“—and you’re friends with Colin Creevey, aren’t you?” she continues, refusing to acknowledge his outburst. "After that soppy bloody interview you gave him about the She-Weasel, he should owe you at least fifteen favors—so, ask him about the picture, ask him about the paper it was printed on, or—or how it was developed. Ask him if he can tell anything about where it came from or what camera was used or—”

“—the fuck is a _tizzy_ —”

“—because you have 72 hours, Potter, and it can't be _too_ terribly difficult to trace the location of a _criminal_ who’s stupid enough to blackmail both the Boy Who Lived and, indirectly, a _Parkinson_ —”

“—wasn’t _overreacting_ , alright, there was no _tizzy_ —”

“—then you can have him arrested, or set your merry band of Weasleys on him while he sleeps—whatever you like, it’s hardly my concern, I just think that you're behaving like an _imbecile_ right now. I mean, God, how do you function without Granger? How are you still _alive_ if this is how you approach problem-solving?”

He’s gritting his teeth by the time she’s done speaking.

“Couldn’t have offered up any of those suggestions half a bloody hour ago?” he asks hotly.

She curves her lips into a patronizing smile.

“Your _tizzy_ was far too amusing to interrupt,” she purrs.

He crosses his arms over his chest and slumps backwards into the island, the broad line of his shoulder grazing her chin as she turns to face him again. He smells like plain white soap and the smoke from her cigarette. She holds her breath.

“Right,” he says, eyes darting down and sweeping across her neck and her jaw and her mouth—he’s studying her, she suspects, memorizing the imperfections, the dimple puckered in the meat of her right cheek, the cluster of tawny brown freckles above her pulse point, the miniscule, waxy white scar marring the front of her throat, a mostly invisible remnant of the war, a parting gift from the Carrows—

“You should go,” she whispers, stepping away. “You should—find Creevey. See if he can help. The letter and the—the picture—they’re on the table over there, but I’ve got—Zabini and I are going shopping, and he gets—he gets whiney if I’m late.”

Potter blinks rapidly, as if clearing his vision.

“Er—yeah, alright,” he says, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. She tries not to notice his fingers, long and slender and graceful, tries not to think about what he _did_ to her with them less than a day ago—“You don’t want to come? With me, I mean? Not—I didn’t—you don’t want to _join me_ , is what I meant—”

She starts to walk towards the foyer, grimacing as the underwire of her bra pokes into her rib cage.

“No,” she replies, motioning for him to follow her. “I already told you, Potter, I don’t _care_ if this gets out. I’m not even being properly blackmailed. This is your problem, not mine.”

She can tell that he wants to protest, but she’s already opening the front door, preparing to usher him out—

An industrial yellow envelope, unmarked and unassuming, is resting on her forest green welcome mat.

“Still not your problem?” he asks.

She frowns.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” she says, inspecting the envelope. It feels just like Potter’s, thin and feather-light. “Why would they do this twice? They had to have known that you’d share your letter with me, it’s _logical_ that you did, and risking two midday deliveries when they don’t—”

She breaks off.

She stares at the picture in her hand.

Apprehension settles like a lead weight in the pit of her stomach.

“Parkinson?” Potter asks, tone questioning.

She doesn’t answer.

Nausea roils as she reads the attached note, even shorter than Potter’s had been:

_Pansy—_

_Let’s make this a bit more personal, shall we? Hopefully she doesn’t go into labor before you pay your share._

“—what’s wrong?” Potter’s saying, spinning her around with a firm grip on her shoulder.

She gives him the photograph.

She doesn’t need to look at it anymore.

“Shit,” he murmurs.

She closes her eyes, but all she sees are Theo and Daphne Greengrass, unconscious and tied up, rope burns on their wrists and duct tape across their mouths, a shiny silver revolver lying next to their hands—

“Give me five minutes to change,” she says abruptly. “I’m coming with you to—to Creevey’s. Just—five minutes.”

“Parkinson, we should contact—”

She spears him with an icy glare.

“ _Five minutes_ , Potter,” she hisses, and she hates that her voice is shaking, hates that he can hear her waver and crack and crumble, but she can’t—“Please.”

Five minutes. That’s all she needs.

He shrugs, but she can see the way his knuckles are white as he holds onto the photograph.

“Five minutes, then,” he agrees.

 

* * *

 


	4. the b team

* * *

 

**_April 22, 2001_ **

**_12:10 pm_ **

She climbs the stairs with a mounting feeling of dread.

_Five minutes._

She goes through the motions of undressing once she reaches her bedroom—she combs out the messy, unkempt strands of her braid, uses a handful of copper bobby pins to sweep back her fringe, slips a flamingo pink elastic around her hair and twists the mass of it into a sagging topknot; she tugs off her socks and her underwear, flings them in the vague direction of her grey wicker laundry hamper, gets her arms stuck in the sleeves of her shirt before wrestling it onto the carpet; she unhooks the front clasp of her burgundy silk bra with faintly quivering fingers, catches her nail on the tiny satin bow sewn onto the seam between the cups and swears violently as she feels her cuticle tear; her pearl pink manicure, still almost flawless from the wedding, is now damaged. She stares down at her hand, at the chipped sliver of luminescent paint peeling away from her nail.

_Five minutes._

She collapses onto the edge of her bed.

She draws her legs up.

She presses her forehead to her knees.

She tries not to cry, but—

_Five minutes._

Pansy knows that she isn’t a good person.

She lies—often, egregiously, with next to no guilt and only the faintest twinge of apprehension that she might get caught. She says mean things about nice people, _thinks_ even meaner things about even nicer people—she isn’t gentle and she isn’t soft-spoken and she isn’t selfless. She cheats at card games and drinking contests and pointless, petty arguments, has no qualms about bending rules and denying facts and manipulating statistics—not because she’s particularly competitive, no, but because she likes the idea of being _better_ than everyone else. It isn’t about winning, it’s about proving herself.

And Pansy _knows_ she isn’t a good person.

She had never loved Theo.

Not properly.

He had been exactly what she had needed after the war had ended—placid and solid and _understanding_ , aware of her faults and unencumbered by what they should have meant to him. He had been her friend, had lived through that last harrowing year at Hogwarts with her; she hadn’t ever planned on dating him, not truly, but he had been tall and he had been sweet and in the months following the fall of the Dark Lord, he had been the only person not locked up in Azkaban who hadn’t looked at her like she was fragile, or dangerous, or crazy. He hadn’t blamed her for what she’d done to Potter, and she had latched on to _that_ , to him, had cautiously constructed a careful sort of relationship out of the paltry remaining parts of her that she had still felt safe enough to share.

It had been nice.

It had been _nice_.

It had deteriorated rapidly, of course, as most everything always does in her life, but she had savored it all the same, had luxuriated in the way he had laughed at her jokes, the sound punched out of him in a throaty, helpless huff, as if he had been surprised he could still find anything funny. She had adored the slight gap between his two front teeth, had been diligent about adopting pet names and shrieking them at him in public venues; he had loved her so much in the beginning, so very much—he had been so earnest and affectionate and _patient_ with her.

It had taken him awhile to realize that she had already given him everything she had to give; it had taken him _too long_ , really, and as usual, as _fucking_ usual, it hadn’t been enough.

 _She_ hadn’t been enough.

She blinks as heavy, clunking footsteps sound from the hallway.

_Five minutes._

She scrambles to her feet, unwilling to be caught in such a vulnerable position—

Potter strides into her room, expression irritated, keen green eyes seeking her out as he opens his mouth to berate her, undoubtedly.

He blanches.

He spins around.

The back of his neck is a brilliant, fiery red, and it takes her a moment to remember that she’s naked.

She smirks.

“You—why aren’t you—your bloody _door_ is open!” he says, overloud and outraged.

She snorts.

“You can turn around, you know,” she drawls. “You’ve already had your tongue in the really _important_ bits—all very up close and personal, Potter—so maybe now’s not the time to get squeamish.”

“Don’t—why d’you have to _say_ it like that?” he demands, posture rigid.

She wipes at the tear tracks on her cheeks, rubbing them into her face; her lashes are clumped together and wet, spiky at the tips, and her eyes are likely bloodshot. She’s glad that Potter didn’t get a good look at her.

“Say it like what?” she asks, lilting and innocent. “Your tongue _was_ inside of me last night—quite _dexterously_ , too—so it isn’t really an arguable—”

“Oh, my _God_ ,” he groans, frustration evident. She watches, bemused, as the muscles in his shoulders ripple beneath the thin cotton of his t-shirt. “Just—stop. Christ. I get it, you’re shameless, just— _stop_.”

She grits her teeth, strangely stung by his comment, and an awkward silence descends, harsh and impassive. She fidgets, catching sight of a flimsy lavender robe hanging from a platinum hook on her bathroom door. She doesn’t reach for it. She’s being petty, she knows she is, but Potter has an uncanny talent for flinging offhand insults at her that feel an awful lot like accusations—and shameless is as shameless does, she thinks with a brittle twist of her lips.

“You’re a bit of a prude, aren’t you?” she sneers, stomping towards her wardrobe and pausing in front of the mirror; she gives herself a cursory once-over, takes in finger-shaped bruises on her hips, a stark, dusky violet against the white of her skin, as well as a faint pink flush spreading across her chest, right above the rounded swells of her breasts.

“No,” Potter snaps, shifting uneasily. “I just don’t need to hear you be so— _blunt_ about what we—what I—what happened at the wedding.”

She pouts at her reflection before opening a drawer and pulling out a pair of skimpy black knickers; she unearths a bra, a size too small and canary yellow cotton, and dimly registers that it must be Granger’s, left behind after a recent night out. Pansy shrugs and puts it on anyway, immediately wincing as the straps dig in to her shoulders.

“ _What happened at the wedding_ ,” she repeats in a flat, disbelieving monotone. “Jesus, Potter, you’re fucking hopeless.”

She hears him turn around again, slowly, as if checking to make sure she’s decent.

“What does that mean?” he retorts, a wary edge to his voice.

She releases a pointed, long-suffering sigh, teal linen camisole bunched like a scarf around her neck.

“It’s like McGonagall said in that awful anatomy class they made us all suffer through in third year—if you can’t even bring yourself to _say_ it, are you really mature enough to be _doing it_ —”

He cuts her off with an astoundingly hostile bark of laughter.

“Ah, right,” he scoffs, scratching at his chin; his gaze is pinned to her thighs, and something about the weight of it makes her wish that she’d gotten dressed faster. “ _Maturity_. Is that what we’re calling it?”

Her toes curl into the carpet, tiny, delicate bones creaking at the jerkiness of the movement. A white eyelet lace skirt is pooled at her feet, just waiting to be stepped into and zipped up.

“I don’t know, Potter,” she simpers, deceptively benign. “Is it?”

He saunters over to her, gait uncharacteristically stiff.

“You’re fucking with me,” he states, pointblank. “You’re _always_ fucking with me.”

She offers him a smug smile, but she doesn’t mean it. She’s finding that she doesn’t mean even half of what she says or does around Potter.

“So those glasses _aren’t_ just for show,” she says, tart and tenuous.

He crosses his arms over his chest and stares at her, expression alternating quickly between a rather startling array of emotions—she catches confusion and resentment, exasperation and impatience and wistfulness, anxiety, concern, self-loathing, defeat, denial—

“You said five minutes,” he eventually announces, cracking his knuckles with a brisk shake of his hand. “I waited ten. You’re still half naked.”

She is aware, all at once, of precisely how close he’s standing to her; within reach, certainly, and with only a very few inches separating her bare skin from the heat of his body. She counts her heartbeats, glances at the slightly shredded ribbed collar of his t-shirt—it looks soft, old, as if it has gone through the wash one too many times and he’s simply too stubborn to retire it. He has a deep, dark pink scar on his right forearm, waxy and puckered, roughly the size of her fist, and she wants to ask him how he got it, if it’s left over from the war, if it ever still hurts and aches and tingles at the most inopportune of moments, like hers does.

“It’s all for you, Potter,” she manages to coo, curving her lips upwards, aiming for provocative and likely missing horribly—because she is unsettled, off-balance, and she knows that there are worse things in her world than being attracted to Potter, really, truly, she _does_ —but she can’t seem to think of any of them right now, can’t seem to move past the bewildering inevitability of the next several seconds—

“Hoping for an encore?” he asks, tone difficult to interpret. “Thought you were the sort who was one and done, Parkinson—or were the rumors all wrong?”

She isn’t sure how he expects her to respond; he strikes her as eager for a fight, for a distraction, and she’s having trouble determining whether or not she wants to give him either.

“I imagine a great many of the rumors you’ve heard about me are wrong,” she says coolly.

“Yeah?”

“Mm,” she says, chewing the inside of her mouth as he looks at her legs—she stays still as his eyes skim over her knickers. His fingers twitch against the corded bulge of his bicep. Her breathing falters. “For example—you said, at the wedding, that I was famous for—what was it?— _below average blowies in the pantry_?”

He swallows roughly.

“Is that…erroneous?”

She licks her lips, feeling curiously empty. This is too easy. Theo had been easy. Potter isn’t supposed to be.

“I could provide you with a demonstration, I suppose,” she purrs, cocking her head to the side; he takes an aborted half-step forwards, as if operating wholly on instinct, and she knows that she’s won. “So that you can make an informed decision.”

His pupils are dilated as he reaches out, skimming the back of his hand across the bottom of her camisole, pausing at the hollow of her pelvis. The air between them, she is positive, has turned stiflingly, blisteringly hot. She’s dizzy with it.

“But we’re not in a pantry, Parkinson,” he murmurs, dipping the callused tip of his thumb under the elastic lace waistband of her knickers. “Surely that negates the—ah— _scientific validity_ of the experiment?”

She hums, flicking her tongue over the ridge of her teeth.

“Guess we’ll have to do it twice, then,” she replies, heart hammering as his fingernail just barely grazes the front of her cunt. “For—for science.”

He presses himself closer, backing her up until her spine hits the polished walnut door of her wardrobe. His wrist is trapped inside of her underwear, and the heel of his palm is feather-light as it drags over her clit. She shudders, swaying forward; he doesn’t bother catching her, lets her fall into his chest, and drops a proprietary hand on her hip to hold her in place.

“Already planning another round sounds an awful lot like a commitment,” he says dryly—and if it had been anyone else saying those words to her, anyone at all, she might have thought that they were being playful. But it isn’t anyone else, it’s Potter, and he isn’t ever playful with her. She knows better.

“Con—consider the source,” she gasps, dragging her nails over the flat of his stomach; his fingers aren’t moving against her cunt, aren’t even really touching her at all as they push out against the fabric of her knickers—she’s so fucking _aware_ of them, though, so aware of how they hover and drift and gently, cleverly scrape at her skin, teasing at the possibility of plunging in and fucking her hard—

“The source,” he echoes, and she’s jolted back to reality as the hand on her hip tightens dangerously; she isn’t, she realizes with an unpleasant start, in control any longer. “Meaning—what? You don’t do commitment?”

Her head swims. Is she underwater? His fingers flutter against her cunt, distracting her, and she’s wet, she’s _dripping_ , and her vision goes blurry as he crushes her clit beneath his palm, his _pulse_ , and this is a game to him, it has to be, but she can’t—she isn’t—she _can’t_ —

She surges up.

She kisses him, open-mouthed and filthy, a little sloppy and a lot aggressive.

He melts.

She squirms, the pressure in her abdomen almost unbearable; she needs him to _do_ something—

He freezes.

“Parkinson—” he breathes out, and she hates the uncertainty in his voice.

“Yes or no, Potter,” she whispers, toying with his belt buckle. She plucks at the brown leather strap; his cock is a hard line against the zipper of his jeans. “In—or—out.”

He inhales sharply.

He grabs her hand.

He forces it away, and her body goes cold.

“We can’t do this right now,” he says quietly, removing his own hand from the front of her underwear. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t—we have to—I wasn’t thinking—Nott and Greengrass—”

He’s floundering, bizarrely apologetic, and Pansy thinks, again, that if it was coming from anyone but Potter—literally, _anyone—_ this awkward, muddled mess of a rejection might have been endearing.

It isn’t, though.

It isn’t endearing.

It’s fucking mortifying.

“I had no idea you cared so much about Theo and Daphne’s wellbeing,” she says, yanking up her skirt and flouncing towards her closet. She’s outwardly calm, can see it in the mirror as she turns away from him, and if it wasn’t for the bone-deep, disconcerting lurch of her gut, she would have been convinced of her own indifference.

“Er—I don’t?” Potter replies tentatively. “But you do, and—”

“Oh, so you’re worried about _me_ ,” she interjects as she swiftly scans rows and rows of white painted shelves for the most intimidating pair of shoes she owns.

“I don’t know that _worried_ is the most accurate term—”

She emerges from her closet wearing six-inch platform stilettos, bright magenta suede with black leather soles. A line of slate grey beads is sewn down the slender, pointed columns of the heels. Zabini had picked them out for her in Milan.

“Is that why you just had your hand in my knickers?” she asks crudely. “Because you were _worried_?”

He sputters with indignation.

“What are you— _no_!” he exclaims. “You can’t just—you _seduced me—_ ”

“I didn’t _seduce you_ ,” she insists, even though she kind of had. “You just— _barged in_ while I was changing—”

“You said five minutes!” he shouts, waving his arm. “Excuse me for wanting to _check on you—_ ”

“Oh, _please_ , like you had _any_ rational reason for charging inside like an idiot bloody Gryffindor—”

“—thought you were fucking _upset,_ sorry if my assumption that you were capable of having an actual _emotion_ is so bloody offensive—”

“—fucking _savior_ complex, God, I don’t need to be _rescued_ —”

“—wasn’t trying to _rescue you_ , I was trying to be a _decent human being—_ ”

“—ridiculous double standards, not my fucking fault you think sex is fucking _sacred_ —”

“—but obviously that’s something you’re not _familiar with_ , no surprises there—”

“—and I don’t _want you_ here at all!”

She clamps her mouth shut.

He scowls at the floor.

She takes a savage sort of satisfaction in the fact that his erection hasn’t gone down—he didn’t get to come, he’s still deliciously, delightfully hard for her—and she hopes, viciously, that the zipper of his jeans is _particularly_ unforgiving.

“You have a plan, then?” she asks, shattering their stalemate. “I don’t want to contact the Ministry. We’ve no idea who’s behind this, and Daphne is pregnant. We shouldn’t—risk anything. I’d just pay the ransom—or the blackmail—but I doubt that’s what this _person_ is actually after. They made it personal. They don’t care about the money.”

He clenches his jaw.

“Oh, now it’s _we_ , is it?” he replies with an acidic sneer. “Now that they’ve kidnapped your cheating arse of an ex?”

She’s careful to keep her expression blank; it isn’t difficult, and she can tell that it annoys him.

“Yes,” she says. “Now it’s _we_. Theo deserves quite a lot of things for what he—for how it—for what happened between us, but _this_ certainly isn’t one of them. So—plan. What is it.”

Potter glances up at her, and she feels skewered by the intensity of his glare.

“Well, considering you seem to have some weird bloody Slytherin insight into how this is all unfolding—”

“Common sense is now _weird bloody Slytherin insight_?” she interrupts, mocking and defensive.

He closes his eyes, nostrils flaring as he exhales.

“Will you just—God, this is a fucking nightmare,” he growls. “Look, Parkinson—this isn’t just about an embarrassing picture being leaked to the _Prophet_ anymore. The stakes are higher. I never liked Nott, and I’ve never even met Greengrass, but they’re probably innocent—”

“ _Probably innocent_?” Pansy bleats. “Are you—what, _exactly_ , are you insinuating, Potter?”

“ _Nothing_ ,” he replies, obstinate. “Nothing. It’s just…well, it’s _odd_ , isn’t it? That _they_ would be used against you like this? As far as anyone knows, you don’t talk to either of them, and you and Nott—I mean, it isn’t a secret how _that_ ended. Besides, they’re—”

She lifts her chin.

“They’re Slytherins,” she finishes for him, refusing to acknowledge the sinking sensation in her stomach; Draco would be appalled if he could see how inexplicably fragile long-term exposure to Potter could make her. “They’re automatically untrustworthy.”

For the first time that day—or in recent memory, truly—Potter looks conflicted. It occurs to her that he might think he’s hurt her feelings. She almost laughs.

“You have to admit that it’s suspicious,” he begins to argue. “In auror training, they emphasized that it’s rarely ever a stranger—”

“Your _auror training_ lasted three months,” she snaps. “And then you flunked out. Or quit. Who really knows? All I’ve heard are _rumors_.”

His face darkens with anger; a direct hit, then, she thinks grimly.

“Just because you don’t want to believe that your precious fucking _Theo_ could possibly be trying to _extort you—_ ”

“ _Stop_ ,” she says, abruptly furious; and her mask falls. Her rage is explosive, arresting, consuming. She decides that it must have always been there, hunting and hating and waiting to strike—because she can’t find the source of it, can’t find the leak, can’t figure out how she got there, and all she knows—all she can think—is that it’s Potter’s fault. It must be. “Theo had nothing to do with this. You don’t know him. He wouldn’t—he knows how this would affect me, and he wouldn’t do that. It’s someone else.”

“How this would _affect_ you?” Potter demands, incredulous. “Because I’m sure he took your feelings into account when he fucking _cheated_ on you, yeah, sounds like a real stand-up bloke.”

She bites down on her tongue until she tastes blood.

“You continue bringing that up like it has _anything_ to do with our current problem,” she hisses. “It doesn’t. Theo has been my _friend_ since I was eleven years old. I don’t know how things work in Gryffindor—from what I gather, it’s just a lot of chanting and butterbeer and abject fucking idiocy—but in Slytherin, you don’t just _forget_ about the people you grew up with. You _don’t._ ”

Potter blinks, features rippling with surprise.

“I didn’t mean—”

“Yes,” she says loudly. “You _did_ mean.”

His teeth clack as he presses his lips together.

She glowers at her window.

A far-off car alarm goes off, blaring and high-pitched.

“We should send an owl to Hermione and Malfoy,” he finally says. “Hermione won’t be happy if she gets back from Paris and discovers we kept this from her. She’ll want to help.”

“No.”

“Parkinson—”

Pansy cuts him off with a venomous stare.

“ _No_ , Potter,” she says again, emphatic. “Draco deserves a week of not having to take care of me and my shit—and I imagine that Granger could use a well-deserved break from yours, too. We can handle this ourselves. You defeated fucking Voldemort, and I—well. This is…easy to deal with. Comparatively.”

The slant of his eyebrows is skeptical.

“What were you going to say just then?” he asks.

She considers feigning ignorance, but she gets the impression that he doesn’t actually expect her to answer him.

“I was going to say that I survived,” she replies simply. “You defeated fucking Voldemort, and I—survived. Are we going to Creevey’s now?”

He hesitates, apparently nonplussed by the subject change.

“You want to track down the blackmailer,” he says slowly. “And—what? Rescue Nott? Not really your specialty, is it?”

“No,” she concedes. “I’m not really cut out for all of that. But _you_ are. And you have to know that whoever’s doing this to us is mostly after me—that picture you’re so terrified might get back to the She-Weasel is as good as published in the _Prophet_ if you pretend you didn’t see the ransom note.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“Yes, it does,” she says, turning to pick up a beige python clutch off the corner of her bedside table. “You fucked me at the wedding. You got caught. The blackmailer thinks you’re on my side, and wants to punish you for it, which is the whole point of the picture.”

“And what’s the _whole point_ of taking Nott and Greengrass?” he asks, sounding perturbed.

She pauses—because that’s the question that’s been niggling at the back of her mind since she’d opened the bloody envelope. If the blackmailer had only wanted to hurt _her_ , they would have just killed Theo; they wouldn’t have bothered with a kidnapping, with snatching Daphne, with taunting Pansy about the pregnancy. They would have gone after Draco, after Granger—they wouldn’t have included Potter and that silly fucking photograph at all.

“I don’t know,” she admits. She doesn’t say anything else; she doesn’t want to share her thoughts with him. “But we should go. If your little friend can tell us where the pictures came from, we might be able to figure out who sent them. Motive doesn’t matter right now.”

He moves towards her bedroom door, eyes lingering on her legs.

“Motive always matters,” he remarks flatly.

She grabs his elbow.

He stops walking.

“I agree,” she says, unsure why it’s suddenly so important to her that he knows that.

The skin around his mouth pinches in a frown.

He shrugs her hand off.

“Creevey lives in Bristol,” he mutters. “And I’m too hungover to Apparate. We’ll have to take the train.”

She grimaces.

“Muggle transportation,” she sighs, following him down the stairs. “Fucking wonderful.”

 

* * *

 


	5. a proclamation

* * *

 

**_April 22, 2001_ **

**_1:30 pm_ **

Potter pays for their train tickets with a sleek silver credit card, and the cashier—pretty, young, red-haired—flushes when he offers her a distracted smile. Pansy has to bite back an unkind comment about the She-Weasel; Potter would have a self-righteous Gryffindor fit, she’s certain, and she still feels strangely… _drained_ from their earlier argument. It isn’t really worth it. She guesses that they’ll soon find something more interesting to fight about, anyway.

“We have seven minutes,” he says, leading her to a narrow bank of uncomfortable looking plastic chairs.

She perches daintily on the very edge of her seat.

“Seven whole minutes? _However_ shall we entertain ourselves?” she drawls, picking at her fingernails.

He looks at her legs— _again_. She feels a grim sort of amusement at his woeful lack of subtlety.

“We could strategize,” he suggests, tilting his head back; a faint smattering of coarse black stubble shades the skin beneath his chin, stopping halfway down his neck.

She crosses her legs at the knee, feeling twitchy. An enormous ‘NO SMOKING’ sign takes up half of the far station wall, and she sneers as she studies it. Fucking typical.

“What is there to strategize?” she asks with practiced, perfunctory indifference.

He sighs.

“Really, Parkinson?”

“We already have a plan,” she replies, somewhat shortly. What did muggles have against smoking? “We’re going to visit this Creevey fellow in bloody Bristol, we’re going to show him the photograph you were sent, and we’re going to see if he can tell us anything about where it was developed. That’s our fucking strategy. We can reevaluate our— _options_ —later tonight.”

He sits up straight in his chair.

“We’re going to show him _both_ photographs,” he corrects. “What if they’re different? What if they’re not even from the same person?”

She bristles.

“I think we both know the odds of that are _miniscule_ —there’s absolutely no need to inform the fucking masses that Theo has been kidnapped.”

He narrows his eyes, and they glint a deep, emerald green in the overhead fluorescent light.

“ _Inform the fucking masses_ ,” he says, tone turning acidic. “Because that’s the first thing Colin would do, is it?”

She purses her lips, tugging at the strap of her camisole. The silk is oddly scratchy against her bare shoulder. She absently wonders if she remembered to replace the empty pack of cigarettes in her bag.

“I don’t know. I don’t know him. I don’t _trust him_.”

He clenches his jaw.

“Well, _I_ do. He’s trustworthy. God, he fought a bloody _war_ with me, which is more than I can say for—”

“Oh, look, the train’s here,” she interjects, voice pointedly, deliberately even; she doesn’t want him to finish his sentence—she knows what he thinks of her, of her old friends, of her past. It isn’t flattering.

He massages his forehead.

“Yeah,” he mutters. “Let’s go, then.”

They board the train under a veil of thick, heavy silence. She follows him into an unoccupied compartment and makes sure to take the seat closest to the door.

“So—let me get this straight,” he says, sitting down across from her and tapping his fingers against his thigh; she notices that his jeans are awfully snug. She can’t imagine that he’s comfortable. “You’re willing to show Colin a picture of the two of us…”

“Fucking,” she supplies, sweetly saccharine.

His gaze sharpens.

“ _Fucking,_ ” he says, enunciating slowly, as if he’s tasting the word. “Yeah. That. So—you’re willing to show Colin a picture of us—doing that, but a picture of your cheating ex-boyfriend in mortal danger is too—what? Too _personal_?”

She feels a surge of blistering hot anger flare to life in the pit of her stomach, sudden and swift. Saliva floods her mouth—she’s positively fucking _itching_ for a cigarette now.

“ _Do_ stop bringing up the cheating thing, Potter—it makes you sound petty. Or maybe—maybe it’s more _personal_ than that—something you want to share about what _really_ happened with the She-Weasel?”

His entire body tenses.

“Fuck you,” he snaps.

“In public?” she gasps mockingly. “ _Dirty_ boy.”

He drags a hand through his hair; the motion is jerky, almost violent, and she thinks she might have hit a nerve, which is—unbelievable. Had Potter actually cheated on the She-Weasel? Is that what had gone wrong? Abstractly, Pansy knows that he’s more than capable of such a thing—he’s a man, and he’s a bit of a bastard, and she can recognize the signs of deeply buried, deeply ingrained self-loathing when she sees them; she has a mirror, after all. But the idea of Potter _cheating_ —it’s ludicrous. He’s nothing like Theo. He’s nothing like _anyone_. He’s always been in a class of his own, a stand-out, somehow separate from the rest of the world; he wouldn’t cheat, she’s sure of it. He and his merry band of heroes are loyal to a bloody fault.

“You’re fucking—never mind. I’ll be back,” he says curtly, edging past her to reach for the door handle. His jeans brush against her knees as he pauses, seemingly for no reason; she forces herself to look at his belt—distressed brown leather, scuffed and soft.

He doesn’t look at her.

The moment passes.

He moves away again.

She doesn’t ask where he’s going, and he doesn’t volunteer the information.

The door slides shut behind him with a quiet, anticlimactic snick of cheap plywood and rubber, and she immediately reaches for her bag. She rummages around for a while before producing a flattened, misshapen cardboard cigarette box.

She huffs.

It’s empty.

Of course it’s fucking empty.

 

* * *

 

**_2:15 pm_ **

When he finally returns, she’s reclining lengthwise along the sticky leather train bench, eyes closed and face dappled with fractured streams of sunlight; she’d opened the blinds of the small compartment window in his absence, and her skin feels pleasantly warm.

“Here,” he says, tossing something at her lap.

She squints at him.

“What?”

He makes a vague, slightly embarrassed motion with his arm and slouches in the seat farthest away from her.

“Sandwich,” he explains, voice tight. “I woke you up this morning, and I know you haven’t eaten anything.”

Her eyebrows fly upwards, practically to her hairline. She eyes the sandwich with something she doesn’t want to admit is suspicion—it’s on spongy white bread, wrapped in cellophane, and has a cheerful, spring-green sticker plastered haphazardly along its front. She’s dumbfounded. They aren’t friends. They aren’t—anything. She can’t tell if this is an apology—which she can privately admit she doesn’t deserve—or a clever ploy to get her to lower her defenses. She knows which one it would be if the sandwich had come from _her_ , but Potter could be so frightfully fucking _noble_ sometimes; she can’t discount the possibility that he’s simply being…nice. Like a Gryffindor. How _tedious_.

“You bought me a sandwich,” she says, deadpan.

He fidgets. A honey yellow packet of crisps crinkles between his fingers.

“Figured you were probably hungry,” he replies, spreading his legs.

She sits up and tugs her skirt over her thighs.

“Did you?” she asks, feigning disinterest. She feels—out of sorts. _Unsettled._ She dislikes it. No. She dislikes _him._

He sniffs.

“Yeah.”

She plucks at the cellophane wrapper of the sandwich.

“You bought me a sandwich,” she says again, bemused.

He tears open his crisp packet with a quick flick of his wrist; she can appreciate the way the muscles in his forearms flex and shift and stretch as he does it. She scowls at the thought.

“It’s just a sandwich,” he replies with a shrug.

She watches him skeptically. He isn’t eating his crisps.

“Of course,” she concedes. She decides that if she waits long enough he’ll probably crack; Gryffindors aren’t a patient lot.

He licks his lips.

She makes an elaborate show of inspecting the sandwich—she sees wilting red-leaf lettuce and a smear of whole-grain mustard.

He clears his throat.

She swings her ankles, sky-high magenta stilettos catching on the industrial grey carpet.

He coughs.

She hums.

He restlessly jiggles his foot.

“You’re just—you’re really skinny,” he blurts out.

She stiffens.

“I’m the same size as Granger,” she says, straining to keep her face blank.

The corners of his mouth turn down, and—

She thinks about all the looks he’s given her—heated and irate and wary and _liquid_ , mesmerizing, magnetic—and she thinks about how he’d seen her naked earlier, how he’d stared and stammered and then, ultimately, _rejected_ her—

“Hermione’s got to be three or four inches shorter than you,” he says.

She doesn’t flinch. She refuses to. He knows fucking _nothing_ about her, least of all how bloody tall she is.

“Is this an intervention?” she asks, lifting her chin. “For my non-existent eating disorder? Bit crass, isn’t it, to do it somewhere I can’t escape?”

He wrinkles his nose.

“What? What are you—no, I just—you didn’t eat breakfast,” he tries. “And I didn’t—I don’t think you have a fucking _eating disorder_ , Christ, I just… _noticed_ that you’d—gotten thin. _Thinner_ , I mean. Too thin. I didn’t—it’s just a fucking sandwich.”

She grits her teeth so hard that she faintly hears the enamel squeak.

“ _Too thin_ ,” she repeats, carefully concealing her fury. “Is that your expert medical opinion, Potter, or are you comparing me to someone specific?”

He blanches, and she feels a savage stab of satisfaction twist inside her chest. She wants him just as off-balance, just as _disoriented_ as she is. He deserves it.

“Comparing— _what_?”

She tosses the sandwich onto the bench next to her and leans forward; his eyes flick to the neckline of her camisole, to the exposed tops of her breasts, and she almost smirks. A dull red flush creeps across his neck. She thinks he might start to get angry soon. Which is—good. He’s impulsive when he’s upset, and highly, distressingly observant when he isn’t; she far prefers the former.

“You said I was _too thin_ ,” she simpers, twirling a loose strand of hair around her finger. “At what point would I be _just thin enough_ , Harry?”

He startles at the sound of his first name.

“I didn’t mean—there isn’t—I wasn’t comparing you to anyone,” he says.

“Oh?” she all but coos, masking her derision with a smile. “Just personal preference, then?”

He shifts in his seat, brow furrowed with what she assumes is irritation.

“You should be more direct if you’re fishing for compliments,” he says tersely.

She pouts.

“I normally don’t have to _fish_ for _anything_ ,” she returns, lowering her shoulders and pushing her breasts together; the move is calculated—he can’t see much of anything, she knows that, but his gaze still darkens as she traces the line of her cleavage with the tip of her finger, and she feels—triumphant. It isn’t as fulfilling as she expected it to be.

“You’re such a bloody—” he breaks off. He tugs at the fringe of hair falling across his forehead. “What is your _problem_ , Parkinson? With me, I mean?”

Her lips part in disbelief; surely he isn’t _serious_.

“I—” she begins, but then stops. It’s _Potter_. Of course he’s serious, and earnest, and probably incredibly fucking offended by her reluctance to praise him, indiscriminately, for—what, exactly? Bringing her a sandwich? Deigning to shag her in the bathroom at Granger’s wedding? Saving the world? “I don’t understand the question.”

He scoffs, and she thinks the sound is strangely bitter, coming from him.

“Classic Slytherin deflection,” he mutters, not making any attempt to hide his disdain.

She scrunches her nose up before remembering, belatedly, that that is her least attractive facial expression.

“As opposed to— _what_? Classic Gryffindor grudge holding?” she retorts, quickly standing in the low-ceilinged compartment; she needs to be taller than him for this conversation. She needs to—they’ve never been on equal footing, not truly, not _ever_ , and she needs to change that.

He glares up at her, lip curled.

“At least I’ve got a bloody good fucking reason to hold a grudge,” he snarls. “What have you got? An empty mansion, a too-full bed, and not a single fucking friend left willing to be seen with you in public. Even Malfoy didn’t want you coming to Friday dinners—Hermione had to convince him. Didn’t know that, did you?”

She swallows, and then she swallows again, and then she feels the muscles around her mouth do something reflexively—tighten, maybe, but she can’t be bothered to check, no, not when his words are fucking _ringing_ in her ears, sour and scathing, and her stomach is clenching and her heart is pounding and she can’t breathe, she doesn’t want to breathe, she wants this moment to last and last and _last_ because she knows, from experience, that once her shock wears off it will all only get worse—

“Your _good fucking reason_ is in the past, Potter,” she spits out. “Just like everything else you care about. Dead parents, dead godfather, dead Dumbledore—and an ex-girlfriend who ran away from you as fast and as far as she bloody could after you proposed to her. But none of that’s _your_ fault, right? It’s always someone else’s.”

His pupils dilate as he meets her eyes, chest heaving and rage palpable—and she thinks that her anguish must be undetectable, no, _invisible_ , because he is _furious,_ not sorry, and if he sensed even a _fraction_ of her inner turmoil, his conscience—that thing she both detests and envies in equal measure—would have already made him apologize, made him _leave_ —

And that is unacceptable.

 _She_ will be the one to walk away from this. From him.

 _She_ will be the one to make him sorry.

“We took a vote, you know,” he finally says, pushing his glasses back up his nose; the gesture is unnecessarily aggressive. “About Friday dinners. No one wanted you there except Hermione. Zabini even tried to vote twice against having you around—Malfoy pretended not to notice.”

She snorts out a humorless laugh, and the skin between his eyebrows puckers in surprise; he’s quite obviously disconcerted _,_ and she thinks, not for the first time, that it’s a bloody miracle he’s still alive if he’s this transparent to everyone.

“A _vote_ ,” she says mockingly. “How _democratic_.”

He studies her for a second too long.

Her scalp prickles.

Without warning, he gets to his feet just as the train sways into a bend in the tracks. He stumbles, arms flailing, and his hands smack her shoulders; almost immediately, the train rights itself, and he grabs onto her, holding himself up.

She releases an involuntary gasp at the contact.

Because—

He’s too close. The compartment is too small. Her breasts are pressed against his chest, and his mouth is _right there_ , lips parted and tongue wet, and his anger—explosive and irrational and impetuous and such an excellent fucking _distraction_ from the blunt, bludgeoning truth of what he’d said to her—has transformed, mutated, turned into something else, and she feels raw, she feels empty, she feels the calluses on his palms and the spearmint on his breath and the weight of his uncharacteristically calm appraisal—

She has emotional whiplash. She wonders if it’s the same for him, if he finds himself slipping and sliding from one extreme to another whenever they’re together. She suspects he might. She doesn’t know what that means to her.

“Let go of me,” she hisses, jerking back.

His grip tightens.

“Don’t think I will,” he says, tone icy.

She considers shoving him away— _hard_ , she’d push him _hard_ —but she isn’t Granger. She isn’t a Gryffindor. He’s expecting her to respond violently, she’s sure; he’s expecting her to stomp her heel onto his toes, to drive her knee into his groin, to wrench herself out of his grasp and draw her wand. That’s what anyone else would do.

His nails dig into her skin, as if he’s anticipating a sudden movement.

Her resentment—roaring and cold and fierce, like a blizzard, like an _avalanche_ —swells in the back of her throat.

He thinks he can _intimidate_ her, does he?

“Well,” she says, softening her voice, relaxing her posture, curling her finger into one of his belt loops and looking up at him through the fringe of her lashes, “I suppose if you won’t let go on your own, I’ll just have to make it worth your while to, won’t I?”

Confusion clouds his features.

“What? What are you—”

She reaches up, shushing him with a playful wave of her hand. His lips catch on the pad of her thumb, and she shivers. His expression falters.

“Tell you what, Potter,” she murmurs. “If you agree to let me go, right now…”

His tongue darts out.

“If I agree?” he prompts.

She drags her fingers across his chin, down his throat, over the smooth planes of his chest and the subtle ridges of his abdomen—she feels him inhale sharply when her hand stops at the low-slung waist of his jeans.

“You agree to let me go, and I’ll…” she trails off, shyly nibbling on her lower lip.

His eyes are a hazy forest green.

“You’ll…?” he manages.

She shifts her body so that her hips are snug against his, and then leans forward, mouth grazing the shell of his ear as she speaks.

“You agree to let me go, Potter,” she whispers, dipping her fingertips into the hollow of his pelvis. “And I’ll suck your cock.”

His reaction is instantaneous.

“ _What_ —” he yelps, lurching backwards and grimacing as he drops his hands from her shoulders.

She can’t help herself; she sniggers meanly, shaking her head and crossing her arms over her chest as she leans into the wall.

“I swear, Potter, if I didn’t know for a _fact_ that you aren’t a virgin—”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he demands, clearly outraged. “You’ve got a bloody wand and you aren’t half bad with it, I’ve seen you, you don’t have to trade—”

“Oh, you thought I was _serious_?” she interjects with a condescending lilt to her voice. “How precious.”

He glowers as she saunters over to the compartment’s sliding door; she’s leaving, she decides abruptly. She needs a fucking cigarette. It’s imperative to her health.

“You tricked me,” he says, voice neutral.

“And here I thought I’d have to spell it out for you.”

The angle of his jaw is mutinous as he moves towards her again.

“Look, Parkinson—”

“No,” she says, suddenly harsh; her knuckles are white as she holds onto the frame of the door. “Don’t touch me again. And don’t follow me, either. We’re an hour out from Bristol, and we’re going to finish this business with Creevey and the blackmailer and Theo and after that—I swear to God, Potter, if I _never_ have to fucking talk to you again, it’ll be too bloody soon.”

He turns on his heel and collapses into the seat that she’d previously been using; the sight makes her flinch, for whatever absurd reason, and she has to force herself to stay still.

“Won’t be sucking my cock today, then, I take it?” he sneers.

She goes quiet for a minute, relishing the faint hint of red she can see blooming across his cheeks; he can’t play her game, he has to know that, and still— _still_ he keeps trying. If it wasn’t so fucking stupid of him, she’d almost be impressed by his resilience.

“No,” she replies with a smug curl of her lips. “I won’t. You’re welcome to try again tomorrow, though. Us Slytherins can be so damnably _fickle,_ can’t we? Can’t really trust a thing that comes out of our mouths.” She pauses, and then chuckles. “Although—you’re probably much more interested in what’s going _in_ my mouth, aren’t you, Potter?”

His nostrils flare, and he glances down; she follows his gaze, quirking an eyebrow when she sees how intently he’s staring at the sandwich he’d bought her. She’d nearly forgotten about it.

“I don’t understand you,” he eventually says, poking at the edge of the sandwich bread through its clear cellophane wrapper; the crust crumbles. He frowns.

“No,” she agrees, disinterestedly. “You most certainly don’t.”

He takes off his glasses and squeezes his eyes shut. He looks frustrated.

“What if—what if I said I wanted to?”

She scoffs and yanks at the door handle.

“I’d call you a liar.”

He glares.

“That’s not fair. You don’t even—”

“You know what else isn’t fair, Potter?” she interrupts pleasantly. “Draco letting Blaise vote twice and none of you fine, upstanding young Gryffindors bothering to intervene. So—piss off. I’m going to go find a cigarette.”

He winces.

“Wait,” he calls out as she steps into the train corridor. “Parkinson—”

She doesn’t wait.

 

* * *

 


	6. the line that blurs

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warning** : Pansy is kind of attacked about halfway through the chapter and has a traumatic flashback as a result. It’s very vague, and most of the details are implied rather than explicitly stated, but upon re-reading that particular section, I realized that the tone of it is pretty jarring—please be kind to yourselves while you read.
> 
> xoxo

* * *

 

**_April 22, 2001_ **

**_2:40 pm_ **

She stalks into the dining car and raises a dubious eyebrow when she sees the fully stocked bar behind the counter. She shrugs. Alcohol will do just as well as a cigarette would have. Maybe even better.

She sits down at a small table that’s bolted to the floor.

She orders three straight shots of top-shelf tequila.

She drinks them in quick succession, one after another.

She doesn’t bother with the anemic-looking lime wedges.

She then closes her eyes and thinks about how satisfying it would be to break Potter’s pretentious fucking glasses without using magic.

“This seat taken?” a deep voice suddenly drawls from beside her.

She starts.

She glances up.

A tall, blandly handsome young man with sawdust-blond hair and icy blue eyes is standing next to her table. She thinks she might know him, but realizes with a jolt of embarrassment that she can’t be sure—her memories of the months following Theo’s departure are particularly hazy. She’d said and done lots of things that she can only remember the vaguest bits and pieces of.

She clears her throat.

“No,” she answers, motioning towards the chair opposite hers. “Not taken.”

The man smiles, and it’s—shy. Bloody fucking hell.

“I’m Isaac,” he says, offering his hand; she takes it, squeezing half-heartedly when she feels how damp his palm is. He doesn’t have any calluses, not like Potter, which is—oddly disappointing. She scowls. Tequila normally doesn’t make her so fucking _maudlin_.

“Pansy,” she finally replies, drumming her nails against the sticky linoleum tabletop. From across the room, the bartender wordlessly jerks his chin at her empty shot glasses, and she nods, holding up two fingers—she can’t decide if being chatted up by the bumbling muggle equivalent of Neville Longbottom is better or worse than being stuck in an enclosed space with Potter, but she supposes that it won’t matter a bit to her in a couple of minutes.

“Pansy,” Isaac repeats, staring at her with wide, nervous eyes. “Pretty name.”

She squints at him, nonplussed. Because her name isn’t really that pretty, and it doesn’t even have the excuse of being a long-standing family tradition like maybe Hortensia, or Agnes, or Eunice, or something equally Edwardian and dreadful. It’s just a name—a name that her parents had chosen after making a joke about the endless parade of floral arrangements that had been sent to the manor following their announcement of her birth. It isn’t a romantic story, and she often wonders how close she came to being called Rose. Rose Parkinson has a nice enough ring to it.

“Right,” she says with an unconvincing quirk of her lips. “Thank you.”

The bartender places two new glasses of tequila in front of her, and Isaac watches with thinly veiled bemusement as she immediately knocks them both back.

“Er—a little early for all this, isn’t it?” he asks, tugging at his collar—he has on a starched white button-down, neatly pressed and cleanly tailored; his tie is black, and she can see the slight indentation towards the bottom where it’s clipped to his shirt. He looks like he’s going to church. The thought makes her huff out a laugh.

“If you’d had my morning, you wouldn’t be saying that,” she tells him honestly, peering into the bottom of her glass; Rose Parkinson, she thinks, probably wouldn’t deal with her problems the way that Pansy does. Rose Parkinson would volunteer at an orphanage, or meticulously water her vegetable garden, or maybe knit socks for the children’s ward at St. Mungo’s to distract herself from the perpetual fucking sting of all of her closest friends betraying her. Again.

“—what happened?” Isaac is saying, sounding _ever so_ politely concerned.

She snorts and shakes her head—Rose Parkinson wouldn’t pick vicious fights with Harry _sodding_ Potter and still want to shag him.

“Did you go to church this morning?” she blurts out, turning her attention back to Isaac.

He studies her for a long moment, expression blank; he has such unremarkable features, she thinks absently. He could blend in anywhere. She tries to imagine being normal and quiet and unassuming like that. She can’t. She reasons somewhat bitterly that it’s just a character flaw; after all, no one _forces_ her to read the Blind Gossip articles about herself in the _Prophet_. No one forces her to keep them, either.

“No,” he says. “I don’t go to church at all. Why?”

Pansy’s quite certain that Rose Parkinson would go to church; she’d know all the prayers verbatim, and she’d keep an antique gilt bible in her bedside drawer instead of chocolate bars and condoms, and she’d sign up to teach bloody nursery rhymes to screaming toddlers at Sunday school. Rose Parkinson would practically be up for a fucking sainthood.

“Just curious,” she says to Isaac, choosing not to elaborate.

An uncomfortable silence falls. She traces the rim of her glass. Her head is stuffy, _fuzzy_ , and she abruptly reconsiders the wisdom of drinking so much on an empty stomach. It occurs to her that Rose Parkinson wouldn’t do things like this—no, Rose Parkinson would be able to avoid hangovers entirely. Rose Parkinson would have also had the foresight to make herself a fucking omelet for breakfast; Rose Parkinson would have actually known _how_ to make herself a fucking omelet for breakfast.

“You look like you could use a bit of air,” Isaac says gently. “Come on—my compartment has a window.”

Pansy’s compartment with Potter also has a window. She doesn’t mention that, though, because—God, she’d have to go back and _sit_ with Potter, wouldn’t she, and he’d inevitably try to _talk_ to her in that annoyingly deep and pleasant and _attractive_ voice of his, and she’d respond in a defensive fashion because it’s _Potter_ and she loathes him and then it would all quite systematically go to hell.

“Yeah,” she replies, gingerly getting to her feet; she has to hold on to the side of the table to balance herself, and as her head swims she begins to feel the first faint stirrings of unease. Or maybe nausea. Is there a difference? “Air is—air is good.”

He wraps a long arm around her waist— _too_ long, she thinks critically, nothing like Potter’s—and leads her to the door of the dining car. It’s incredibly awkward; she doesn’t fit right against his body, and her brain sloshes around her skull with all the movement, which—fuck, that sounds fucking _ridiculous,_ truly, brains don’t _slosh,_ they aren’t _sponges—_ and she wants to giggle, wants to laugh at herself—but her body isn’t listening. How peculiar.

“Did I—did I tell you about how I’m being _blackmailed_?” she asks in a too-loud stage whisper, stumbling over her heels; Isaac’s grip on her tightens, and she winces as his wristwatch digs into her ribs.

“Is that why your morning was stressful?” he replies, tone perfectly even.

Her face is warm, cheeks oddly numb, and she isn’t sure if she’s smiling or not. She notices in a cloudy sort of way that they’re in an unfamiliar part of the train. She doesn’t recall passing through it with Potter when they’d first gotten on.

“Um,” she says, blinking at yet _another_ ‘NO SMOKING’ sign; this one has an oversized picture of a cigarette on its lower half, a thick red line drawn right across the center. “What?”

“The blackmail,” he says again, pausing in a dimly lit stretch of the corridor. “Is the blackmail why your morning was stressful?”

Her lips part and her stomach lurches and that faraway prickle of unease she’d all but ignored five minutes prior sparks back to life with a _vengeance_ —because what kind of man passively watches a strange girl get drunk in the middle of the day and then hardly even reacts when she confesses that she’s being blackmailed?

“What—did I—blackmail?” she repeats, stuttering, _stalling_ —and she wishes, suddenly, that Potter was with her, that she had the ridiculously solid warmth of his body pressed against her side, protecting her, anchoring her, tethering her to a place where she can’t make any more bad decisions, can’t sabotage herself, can’t can’t _can’t_ —

Her vision goes blurry as she blinks back her rage.

There had been another time when she had wished for Potter to rescue her, to rescue _everyone_ , and he hadn’t come. She tells herself that nothing has changed. He isn’t her savior. She doesn’t want him to be.

“Mm,” Isaac replies, sounding amused—but his voice is silky and soft, an enticing, lilting purr rumbling around the edges and melting into her ears, and he’s moving forward and she’s—and he’s—

Her world spins.

She realizes, too late, that he’s backing her into the wall, stepping closer and closer and wedging his knee between her thighs and bracketing his arms around her shoulders and she feels trapped and she feels contained and she feels _threatened_ , confused, uncertain, her only rational thought that something is dreadfully, dreadfully _wrong_ and she shouldn’t have followed him, she shouldn’t have left Potter, she should have known better, _Rose Parkinson_ would have known better, fucking _anyone_ would have known better, but no, no, not her, not _Pansy_ , not the perennial garden-variety fuck-up who likes the forgetful haze that she gets from tequila and the stinging rasp of cigarette smoke clogging her lungs and no no no Isaac’s breath is ghosting over her face and it’s hot and it’s moist and it’s _familiar_ and _no no no_ she freezes and she gasps and she _shuts down_ because she’s been here before, she has, she’s been cornered and she’s been _prey_ and she can’t think, no, she can’t remember, no, she can’t she can’t she _won’t,_ but she’s seventeen again and she’s terrified and terrorized and there’s a pinprick of pain at her neck and a hard chest against her back and she should scream, she knows that, Rose Parkinson would fucking scream and Rose Parkinson would fucking fight but she isn’t—Pansy isn’t—

She shudders and curls her hands into tiny, ineffectual fists.

She isn’t seventeen anymore.

She _isn’t_.

“Where are they?” she manages to choke out. “Theo and—and Daphne? Where—who—who _are_ you?”

Because she isn’t stupid, she _isn’t_ , and she isn’t seventeen anymore, she isn’t, and she knows, she _knows_ , that if she hadn’t been so distracted by Potter and their argument and his awful fucking— _everything_ —she would have noticed that Isaac was unobtrusive and quiet and _boring_ in a dangerous way, a menacing way. She would have recognized the cold, determined glint in his eyes and she would have _run_ back to Potter and his anger and his disappointment and she would have _stayed_ because he hated her, yes, but he would never let someone hurt her, not if he could stop it or help it or—

“—such a sad, pretty girl,” Isaac is murmuring, dragging the pad of his index finger down the slant of her cheekbone. She shivers with revulsion, swallowing noisily, but all she can taste is tequila. She thinks about the lime wedges she’d left untouched on the dining car table. She wonders if Potter’s looking for her yet. “—all thought it would so easy to get close to you, but you’re a _flighty_ thing, aren’t you?”

Fear has rendered her immobile, incapable; she can’t seem to make herself focus, can’t seem to fine-tune her hearing enough to understand what he’s saying. Nothing feels quite real—the wall behind her is thin and flimsy and unsubstantial; the cool, air-conditioned breeze wafting through the train is manufactured and stale; and Isaac’s hand against her neck, her chest, the hollow space between her breasts—it’s phantom, imaginary, a daydream and a nightmare and a _memory_.

“Why are you doing this?” she asks. Her lips barely move. She is disconnected from herself, from her nervous system, is somehow both out of control and paralyzed, _petrified_ , and yet words are rolling off her tongue and her vocal chords are humming and buzzing and she still knows that she has to _listen_ , has to pay attention, because this isn’t just about her, no, not when Theo is missing and Daphne is pregnant and Potter is—Potter is—

“Oh, _darling_ ,” Isaac says, fingers drifting under the hem of her camisole. Her abdominal muscles contract violently—simultaneously eager to push him away and make themselves invisible. Her lashes flutter. “We all know what you did at the end of the war. It’s not exactly a secret, is it? You can’t have really thought you’d get away with—”

“Hey, what’s—” new voice interrupts, calling out from down the hall, and she—she knows that voice, she _does_ , but no, no, why is he _here,_ he shouldn’t be—not yet, not now, not like this—“What the fuck is going on? Parkin— _Pansy_? What are you—what’s this?”

And she wants to collapse.

And she wants to cry.

And she wants to _retch_ , wants to run, wants to stop fucking _shaking_ but knows that it isn’t possible—not yet, not now, not like this—

She almost does nothing.

She almost—

She takes a deep, penetrating breath.

She squares her shoulders. She pushes Isaac away from her—he won’t make a scene, she’s confident of that much, and he goes easily, falling back onto his heels with a slippery wink and a condescending smile. She tugs on the hem of her skirt. She’s going to burn it later. Her earlier fight with Potter—baiting him with a blowjob—it all feels like it happened a lifetime ago. Her fingertips continue to tremble. A tendril of hair has escaped her topknot. She is still tipsy, but not as much as she would have been had Isaac not—had she not been so—her heartbeat is uneven. It skips. She tries to force herself to stop moving. The next few moments are fragile. She thinks she understands what Isaac wasn’t able to finish saying. A single bead of sweat trickles between her breasts. She hopes it doesn’t stain the silk of her shirt. Theo and Daphne are in trouble because of her. It is her fault. Potter won’t be hurt—the picture won’t be published. He was lured in under false pretenses. She is meant to lose everything and he is meant to watch. Her stiletto heels wobble. She remembers twisting her ankle during second year. Draco had laughed. Marcus Flint had carried her to the hospital wing. Granger had been petrified already. Potter had been there. Potter, Potter, Potter. Always Potter. Never Potter. Pansy cringes at the direction her thoughts have gone. Rose Parkinson would know what to do. Pansy doesn’t. Pansy _doesn’t_.

“Potter,” she finally says, training her eyes on the plain slatted wall behind his shoulder.

Isaac watches her, smirking triumphantly. He already seems to know that she isn’t going to tell Potter a thing—not until they’re off the train, at any rate. Potter would do something horribly rash and horribly stupid; whatever Isaac and his friends have planned would be ruined, and Theo and Daphne would suffer. No. This is about Pansy, this is about her, and she can be patient. She can wait to act until she knows more. She is a Slytherin—she is cunning and she is resourceful and she might not be brave like Potter or clever like Granger but she understands how leverage works and she sees with quite alarming clarity how bloody _little_ of it she currently possesses. She needs to wait. She needs to bide her time. She needs to distract Potter and figure out why Isaac looks so familiar. She needs—

“What’s…are you alright? Pansy?”

She needs to—

“Fine,” she replies with a sharp sniff. “I’m fine. Well, as fine as I can be after being so rudely interrupted. Honestly, Potter, if you have to wonder if what I’m doing is what it looks like—it probably is.”

She needs to keep it together, just for a bit longer. She needs to _breathe_. She needs to lie and she needs to pretend and she needs to remember that Potter has never once hesitated to reject her and belittle her and make her feel inadequate.

“—see you around, darling,” Isaac is saying, waving jauntily and tucking his hands into his trouser pockets, walking backwards down the corridor. “We’ll have to continue where we…left off, won’t we?”

Potter spares a short glare for Isaac and then returns his attention to Pansy. His jaw, she notices, is a blunt, hard line, clenched and nearly vibrating as he gnashes his teeth.

“Is that really what was going on? You were—doing _that_ —with him?” he asks, almost toneless.

She meets his gaze, and it isn’t a conscious challenge, not entirely, but she knows that he’s going to take it as one. It’s like he can’t help himself.

“Is there someone else I should have been doing _that_ with, Potter?” she retorts, not really answering his question.

His nostrils flare, and he opens his mouth to respond—to scold her, presumably, for all her shameful, sordid, Slytherin proclivities—but then he stops. He considers her for what seems like minutes but can’t possibly be more than a few seconds. She doesn’t fidget. She wonders, with no small measure of desperation, what he’s seeing as he looks at her.

“Pansy,” he says slowly, voice uncharacteristically gentle, “are you really alright?”

Her lower lip quivers.

His eyes—so, _so_ green, even through those horrendous fucking glasses—flit to her mouth, and a strange expression flashes across his face.

And she _hates_ him, she decides all at once, hates how perceptive he is and how terrible his timing is because he is the _very first name_ at the very top of the list of people she will never allow herself to be vulnerable in front of and if she is _anything_ just then—anything, anything, anything—it is that.

“I’m fine,” she grinds out.

He furrows his brow but doesn’t come closer, or try to touch her or crowd her or intimidate her—it’s as if he _knows_ that she can’t handle that, not yet, not now, not like this. Her irritation spikes.

“ _Are_ you?” he asks again, and she thinks, acidly, that he shouldn’t be this patient with her.

She scoffs and maneuvers herself around him in the hallway, making sure she’s going in the opposite direction of where Isaac had gone.

“Oh, the finest,” she says drolly, wrapping her arms around her waist as she attempts to figure out the way back to their compartment.

She hears him start to follow her, footsteps heavy on the rattling train floor.

“You’re lying,” he replies, firm and serious, “but I can’t tell why.”

She hauls open a connecting car door and doesn’t look back.

“No,” she says, and the word is crisp and stark and surprisingly light on her tongue. “You _want_ me to be lying.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“So is your pathological need to _save_ everyone, God, because isn’t that what this is about, Potter? You wanting to have been the one to _rescue me_ from the big, bad, blond wolf?”

He grabs her elbow and jerks her into an open doorway to their left; she had nearly walked past their compartment, and she wonders if Isaac had been aware of how close they had been to Potter when he’d dragged her out of the dining car.

“No, this is about me wanting you to _admit_ that you’re _lying_ so that I can fucking _help you_!” Potter hisses, sliding the door shut behind them.

“You sure about that, Harry?” she demands, spinning around to face him—he’s leaning back against the door, spine stiff and arms spread wide, effectively blocking her only exit. She lifts her chin.

“Sure about what?”

Her smile is pretty and petty and _mean_.

“Let’s see,” she says, tapping her lips with the tip of her index finger. Her nail polish—still champagne pink from the wedding—has a glazed metallic sheen in the overhead light. “ _Last time_ you saved me—from _myself_ , of course, because I’m such a selfish, silly little Slytherin and needed your _expert moral guidance_ in how to avoid ruining Granger’s wedding, isn’t that right? Anyway— _last time_ you saved me, you ate me out and then fucked me in a hotel bathroom. Can I expect more of the same treatment if I confess that things aren’t so peachy at the moment? Can I negotiate being on top this time?”

His cheeks turn red before he flinches at the venom in her voice. She hadn’t really intended to give him any indication of how upset she truly is with him—with everything—and she fiddles with the zipper on the side of her skirt as she waits for him to speak again.

“If that bloke—if he _hurt_ you—” he starts.

She cuts him off with a brittle, high-pitched giggle. It doesn’t sound even remotely genuine.

“You’re not a very good listener, are you?”

A muscle in his neck twitches.

“If he _hurt_ you—” he tries again, slightly louder.

She cocks her head to the side.

“If he _hurt me_ , Potter, you’d be the last to know,” she interjects snidely.

He rears back as if she’s struck him, which is just fucking—fucking _ludicrous._

“Why are you acting like I’m somehow _crossing a line_ by being—by worrying about you? You were fucking _shaking_ when I found you, and now you’re trying to play it off like, like—like he’s some poor sod at a pub who you sweet-talked into giving you attention.”

Her eyebrows fly up.

“Do you suffer from short term memory loss, by any chance?” she inquires politely.

He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose and purses his lips.

“What?”

“Memory loss,” she repeats as slowly and as simply as she can. “Is it _regularly_ such an issue for you?”

He snorts.

“Look, if this is about earlier—”

“It’s about earlier, yeah,” she interrupts, and she’s _proud_ of how smooth her voice is, proud and a bit frightened, too, because she feels like a stranger has taken control of her body, a stranger who seems to know exactly what to say to shut Potter up. Then again—Pansy has always been at her best when backed into a figurative corner. She thinks the current situation might qualify. “And it’s about this morning, and it’s about last night, and it’s about every single Friday you’ve been a dismissive, judgmental _ass_ to me, Potter. It’s about a lot of things. Do you require an itemized list?”

He winces, and then he swallows, and she tracks the movement of his throat with an intoxicating sort of detachment. She thinks he might look guilty—he’s an absolute _champion_ martyr, she knows that much—but his posture is _just_ defensive enough that she steels herself for another fight. And—

And she _wants_ that, she realizes with dismay. She wants to fight. She wants to fight with Potter, specifically.

What the _fuck_.

She licks her lips and looks away. The sandwich he’d bought for her is still sitting on her abandoned seat, none the worse for wear. She wonders why the sight of it doesn’t infuriate her.

“—not exactly a right little ray of sunshine yourself, Parkinson,” he’s saying, standing up straighter and leveling her with a cool, disdainful glare.

“Mm, no, I’m not,” she returns, swift and easy. “But I also don’t have a commemorative statue the size of the Westminster clock tower being constructed in my honor at the Ministry, do I?”

He recoils, but then he sneers.

“I didn’t—I never asked for _any_ of that,” he insists lowly, and he’s so—he’s so earnest and he’s so vehement and she knows that despite the faint twinge of doubt she’d initially felt that she had been _right_ to not immediately tell him about Isaac and Theo and Daphne. She had been right to wait. Potter would have made a mess of everything before the train had even pulled into the station because finesse, discretion, tact—they’re all concepts that are completely beyond him. And the clusterfuck he’d have stuck them both in if she’d been honest about what Isaac had done to her—about what Isaac had made her feel—God, they probably would’ve had to call _Granger_ all the way back from France just to keep Potter out of muggle prison. Pansy’s memory charms have always been spectacularly weak.

“Maybe you didn’t,” she eventually replies with a dainty shrug of her shoulders; his reactions are exponentially more explosive when she feigns nonchalance. “Does that really matter, though? I imagine you’ll still attend the ribbon-cutting ceremony once it’s done.”

He averts his gaze, mouth turned down at the corners, and something about his expression—militant and guarded and _sad_ , truly—makes her think that she might’ve accidentally exposed a rather fresh, still-open wound. She had prodded at the obvious ones earlier—his dead parents, Sirius Black, the mysterious debacle with the She-Weasel—and had, predictably, received a petulant, bad-tempered fallen hero for her efforts. This is very different.

“Quit changing the subject,” he snaps, scratching at the prickly, day-old scruff lining his jaw. “You—this is about _you_ , not me.”

She rolls her eyes.

“How do you figure?” she drawls, tone tinged with annoyance. “Are we there yet, by the way? My claustrophobia is acting up.”

He grimaces.

“That isn’t how that works.”

She hums.

“You can’t know that.”

He draws his leg up, flattening his foot against the compartment door. There’s a jagged, pin-thin rip in his jeans right above his knee. The frayed split-ends of his shoe laces are touching the floor.

“Yeah, I can, actually. Fear isn’t—temporary. It’s either there or it’s not. It doesn’t take breaks or—Jesus— _act up_ when it’s convenient for you.”

She sweeps her skirt around her thighs and sits down next to the forgotten sandwich, picking it up and holding it in her lap so she can’t do anything stupid with her hands, like tear at her cuticles. She isn’t calm, and she isn’t composed, and that’s none of Potter’s fucking business.

“Do you think it’s a coincidence that the word ‘patronizing’ is so fantastically alliterative with your last name?” she muses. “ _Patronizing Potter_ . It’s almost _cute_ , isn’t it? Like a comic book character. We should get you a cape.”

The train starts to slow down, brakes screeching in protest.

“Oh, look, we’re here,” he announces flatly.

She offers him a sly, sardonic grin.

“ _Convenient_ ,” she coos.

He sighs and then nods at the sandwich in her lap.

“Planning on eating that? Or can I toss it?”

Thoughtfully, she glances down; the sandwich is lumpy, and a tiny dollop of mayonnaise is trapped against the inside of its cellophane wrapper. Her stomach rolls.

“Might save it for later,” she replies with a breezy wave of her hand.

He frowns.

Rose Parkinson, she thinks suddenly, would have already eaten the sandwich. Rose Parkinson would have said _please_ and _thank you_ and then effortlessly charmed Potter into taking her out for afternoon tea. Rose Parkinson would have told him the whole truth and nothing but the truth and probably fucking _fainted_ when he got around to attacking Isaac for besmirching her honor—

Pansy smirks at her reflection in the tiny compartment window.

Rose Parkinson would have been a fucking Hufflepuff.

 

* * *

 


	7. your biggest mistake

* * *

 

**_April 22, 2001_ **

**_7:55 pm_ **

Colin Creevey is missing, apparently.

_Allegedly._

Pansy isn’t convinced that there isn’t something enormously suspicious about what they find at Creevey’s flat— _forced entry, broken lock, no signs of magic, blood spatter on the curtains but not nearly enough to be fatal_ —and at Creevey’s office— _wide open door, overturned desk, emptied drawers, battered briefcase, shattered window_ —and at Creevey’s studio— _muddy footprints, mangled steel camera case, undeveloped dark room prints, flickering red lightbulb_ —

And it’s all so terribly, terribly _contrived_ , the scope of the various scenes so _clearly_ planned and plotted and _staged_ , that it makes a perfect sort of sense for Potter to be so staunchly fucking oblivious to it.

“What are we doing here?” she whines. She’s slouched forward in a hunter green, pleather-upholstered armchair in a grimy, nondescript pub in the dodgy end of Bristol. Potter had dragged her there—without an explanation, naturally—and now he’s glancing furtively around the mostly unoccupied room, posture stiff and gaze alert. He looks _ridiculous_. “We should be doing something _useful_ right now, like going _home_ , where it’s _safe,_ or possibly calling _Granger_ —”

“Oh, _now_ you want to call Hermione?” he snaps, cutting her off. “What happened to ‘ _they deserve a break from dealing with us’_? Huh? What happened to _‘this is easy to deal with’_?”

She instantly thinks of Isaac ambushing her on the train, of the hazy, _hasty_ conclusions she had drawn while trying to distract herself with Potter—with a _fight_ with Potter.

“Changed my mind,” she says with a breezy wave of her hand. “Ladies’ prerogative and all that. Oops?”

The glare he sends her is positively _withering_.

“ _Anyway_ ,” he grinds out, “what we need to now is figure out how and why we have a common enemy, and what, exactly, that common enemy might want with us. Colin disappearing makes him the _third_ victim in less than a day whose only connection to _any_ of this is either me or you—”

“It’s probably safe to assume that _I’m_ the one they’re after, you know,” she interrupts, drumming her fingers against the scarred, age-worn wooden tabletop. “I’m not what anyone would call _popular_ in the wizarding world—made quite a lot of enemies, actually, after I suggested handing you over to Volde—to the Dark Lord. Funny, that.”

His eyes narrow slightly behind his glasses, but he hesitates for a few short seconds before opening his mouth to reply—and she wonders if she should be impressed by this uncharacteristic show of verbal restraint, of _thoughtfulness,_ or if it’s just a natural byproduct of the admittedly remarkable levels of viciousness that their recent arguments have inspired. She thinks, maybe, that it’s a little of both.

How tiresome.

“Yeah,” he says, slowly, “and there’s about twenty sleeper cells full of half-crazed ex-Death Eaters and pissed off blood supremacists who _really_ want my head on a fucking pike, so—it’s equally _safe to assume_ that _I’m_ the intended target, don’t you think?”

She nibbles on the cushion of her lower lip. She wishes that she’d taken the time to put on lipstick earlier, something in understated shades of subtle and soothing, pale pink or beige brown, something so utterly, tremendously _unlike her_ that it would have been _obvious_ to anyone bothering to look that it was a disguise. She hadn’t, though.

“Except Creevey’s not a victim,” she says irritably. “The whole ‘ _missing persons’_ routine at his flat and—well, _everywhere else_ —it was a set-up. We were _supposed_ to see it and believe that he was taken like Theo and Daphne were. ”

“Then where’s Colin?”

She shrugs.

“Don’t really see why it matters.”

Predictably, he bristles.

“He’s my _friend._ ”

“Mm,” she agrees smoothly. “But not mine.”

He clenches his jaw, then, which does a lot of very unfair things to the planes of his face—it squares off his chin and sharpens his cheekbones and hardens his features _just enough_ to shift his usual boyish handsomeness into something far more dangerous and far less approachable. She likes it. She _dislikes_ that she likes it.

“Greengrass and Nott aren’t _my_ friends, either, yet…here I am,” he says, voice detached and a bit icy—and she badly wants to tell him that he doesn’t _do_ cold indifference very well, not like she does, wants to gently steer him back to a tone that fits him better, a tone that’s fierce and solid and _strong_ , like he is—but she doesn’t. She can’t. It isn’t her place.

Instead, she grits her teeth and releases a tinny, disingenuous giggle because that— _that_ , she can do. She’s good at lying.

“Oh, _please_ ,” she scoffs, “no matter _who_ was involved, you’d have been here, what, _fighting the good fight_ —your infallible fucking hero complex would’ve made sure of it.”

He stares at her, his expression quickly shuffling through all of the emotions she would expect such a statement to elicit—but there are other ones there, too, exhaustion eclipsing the anger and a solemn sort of contemplation tearing through the annoyance, and it’s _ludicrous_ , truly, ludicrous and irrational, but it dawns on her that this silence—this rare refusal of his to respond to her in a fashion that she understands, fundamentally, and has also come to dread, unequivocally—this might be his version of an apology.

“We should drink,” he announces abruptly.

Her eyebrows fly up.

“Since that went _so well_ for us last night,” she replies, deadpan.

He snorts, lips curving into a vague, Gryffindor approximation of a smirk.

“Wasn’t _all_ bad, was it?” he asks—no, he _teases_.

And her heart… _speeds up_ , rhythm doubling and tripling and _faltering,_ and it’s silly, it’s tedious, it’s _electrifying_ , but she can recognize the signs of an impending ceasefire—a _truce_ , rather, if only for a few hours—and the prospect is so fucking tempting, so fucking _tantalizing_ , that she suppresses her instinctive urge to shut him down, ignores the faint thrum of unease—of ensuing disaster—prickling at the base of her spine—because she’s tired, she’s _tired_ , fuck, she’s tired of keeping her face blank and her eyes empty and her laughter false, tired of playing coy and dumb, tired of fighting and tired of fleeing and tired of pretending she feels _nothing_ when all she really wants to do is scream— _God_ —and if Potter is offering her even a _fraction_ of an evening where she won’t have to do any of that—well.

_Well._

“ _Bad_ is such a relative term,” she drawls, flashing her teeth in a smug half-smile that she knows is probably a bit too soft around the edges, a bit too sincere and a lot too real. “ _Traumatizing_ might be more accurate.”

“Maybe for whoever found your knickers in the bathroom after we left, yeah,” he returns, light and quick and _easy_ , and she can’t—

She can’t stop herself.

She laughs, and she means it, and it is, she thinks idly, _fatalistically_ , the beginning of the bloody end.

 

* * *

 

**_9:20 pm_ **

It’s awkward.

 _Of course_ it’s awkward.

“So…” he trails off, scratching the back of his neck and taking another gulp of his beer—his second in less than half an hour, not that she’s counting. “Hermione said you…helped her with the wedding?”

Pansy flicks her tongue along the salt-crusted rim of her glass; Potter’s gaze lingers on her mouth for a heat-heavy split-second before he clears his throat and glances away, face flushing splotchy and red.

“I took her dress shopping and then talked her out of commissioning an ice sculpture as the centerpiece for the reception,” she sniffs. “I was basically indispensable.”

“An ice—an ice sculpture,” he repeats, looking bemused. He has a thin layer of beer foam clinging to his upper lip. She doesn’t point it out. “Hermione never...what was she going to have sculpted?”

Pansy snickers.

“A lion,” she says. “A big, fluffy ice lion getting nice and cozy with a big, scaly ice snake. She designed it herself—something about _Hogwarts_ _house unity_ being representative of…fuck if I know, something about post-war relations and pre-war prejudices? It was…surprisingly, _uncomfortably_ sexual, to be honest.”

He grimaces.

“You didn’t tell her that, did you?”

“ _I_ didn’t, no.” She pauses. She waves at the bartender for a refill. She waits for Potter to take another sip of his beer and then casually adds, “ _Draco_ did.”

Potter coughs and sputters and ultimately ends up spraying beer all over the front of his t-shirt.

“Aren’t Slytherins supposed to have…you know, really _finely-honed_ self-preservationskills?”

“Draco’s never really had his head on straight where Granger’s concerned,” she says, candid and a little wry in that peculiar way she only ever is when she drinks. “He’s—he’s _Draco_ before he’s a Slytherin—with her, I mean. She’s his… _exception_.”

Potter doesn’t immediately reply, and the bartender has come and gone with Pansy’s refill by the time he does.

“Is that how it works?” he asks. “In Slytherin? You’re all…” He flaps his hand. “… _one thing_ in public, to the rest of the world, and—something else entirely with…who? Your _exception_?”

Pansy stiffens. She can see where this particular line of questioning is going, can see the shadows of the dots he’s going to try and connect, and she has no desire to go there—not with him, not with anyone, not then and not now and not ever.

“Getting existential, are we, Potter?” she deflects.

He finishes what’s left of his beer and uses the hem of his t-shirt to wipe his mouth— _disgusting_ habit, God—exposing the lower half of his abdomen in the process. He hadn’t taken any of his clothes off when they’d fucked at the wedding, and she feels incredibly _blindsided_ by her own reaction to the sight of his bare torso—because she wants to know, suddenly, what those lean cords of muscle would look like bunched up and straining as he held himself aloft, above her in her bed, and she wants to know, suddenly, what that pale, pale skin would look like covered in scratch marks, _her_ marks, and what the exact, precisely tapered angle of his shoulders to his waist to his hips actually _is_ , and she wants to do the fucking math and take his fucking measurements with her lips and her tongue and her _teeth_ , wants to drag her nails over the space beneath his navel and watch him twitch, quiver, _ache_ , wants to undo the fastenings of his ratty blue jeans and trace the shape of his cock with just the very tips of her fingers—

“Was Nott your _exception_ , then?” he asks in a tone that’s as careful and as curious as she’s ever heard from him.

And that—

She shouldn’t answer him, she knows.

She shouldn’t tell the truth, she _knows_.

She shouldn’t—

“No,” she says, swirling her drink; liquid spirals in the glass, hollow and kaleidoscopic, and it reminds her of a cyclone, a tornado, maybe even a hurricane—as if she could ever be that powerful. “No. Theo was…”

_A crutch._

“Theo was?” Potter prompts, squinting at her from across the table.

_A mistake._

She toys with one of her earrings.

_A lie._

“Theo was…whatever I needed him to be,” she says, like that’s any kind of answer, any kind of explanation—except for her, for this, it _is_ , it absolutely is, and she wonders if Potter even understands the enormity of what she’s said, wonders if tomorrow— _tomorrow_ , when she inevitably remembers to blame either her hormones or the tequila for the unbelievable mess this conversation has become—she wonders if she’ll regret her honesty, if she’ll regret this impossible moment of weakness as intensely as she suspects she will. “He wasn’t my exception, no. He was my mirror.”

She risks glancing up at Potter.

And he doesn’t look at all confused by what she’s just admitted, and that is, she realizes, really, truly, _profoundly_ fucking unsettling. In what world does her cryptic emotional bullshit make sense to _anyone_ , let alone him? Let alone _her_?

“I lied about the voting thing,” he blurts out. “About—Friday dinners, the vote we all took—I mean, yeah, there _was_ a vote, but there’s no way Hermione would’ve ever allowed it to be so informal. It was all anonymous, with little—these little scraps of parchment and this horrible fucking hat she’d knitted—and she did a, a _charm_ , or a hex, or—or _something_ scary, you know how she is—and made it so all the handwriting was the same and you could only vote once and I shouldn’t have lied to you about that, it was—well, I was _angry_ , and stressed out about… _today_ , and last night, and you’re always so—so _unfazed_ whenever I—whenever anyone tries to give you shit for _anything_ and I just wanted—I wanted to hurt you, I think, and I don’t…I don’t know why, not really, but I’m sorry for—for trying to. It wasn’t—decent of me.”

Her jaw drops ever so slightly.

He closes one eye and scrunches his face up as if he’s anticipating a physical blow.

Pansy presses her lips together.

“Right,” she says with a placid, perfunctory nod. “Right. That’s—right.”

He winces.

“Right,” he echoes.

He shifts in his seat.

She drains her glass.

He nervously pokes his tongue around the ridge of his front teeth.

She lets the silence between them stretch—

And stretch—

And _stretch_.

It’s awkward.

 _Of course_ it’s awkward.

“We should do shots,” she suggests mildly.

He gapes and then shoves his glasses back up the bridge of his nose.

“Since that went _so well_ for us last night,” he replies, parroting her earlier objection.

She arches a brow, and she feels the slow-burn ignition of a _challenge_ begin to simmer in her blood, scorching her veins from the inside out—

She smirks.

“Wasn’t _all_ bad, was it, Potter?”

 

* * *

 

**_11:35 pm_ **

He’s on his fourth Jaeger Bomb and she’s on her second when he brings up the blackmailer again.

“Why d’you think—why d’you think Colin’s place was a setup?” he hiccups, folding his arms on top of the table and hunching forward. “And if it was…does that mean—does that mean he’s _in_ on—shit—in on…whatever the hell’s happening to us?”

She fishes her shot glass out of the bottom of her mug and makes a truly valiant effort to disregard how very much she _likes_ Potter referring to the two of them as an ‘us’—because she doesn’t actually like _him_ , not a bit, and the ramifications of thinking of him in that way—of thinking of him and her _together_ , as a single entity—as a _them_ —it’s fucking precarious, is what it is; it’s a treacherously slippery slope, a perfectly preserved minefield, an ominously ticking time bomb, and she just knows _better_ than to think that she would make it out alive. She’d stumble, she’d trip, she’d _fall_ , and she rather doubts that she has anyone left who would care to catch her. Potter certainly wouldn’t.

“That depends,” she says, inspecting the chipped, champagne-pink polish on her fingernails with a petulant frown. “Was he at the wedding?”

Potter’s eyes widen, and then he’s dropping his chin onto his chest, shoulders shaking as he holds in a laugh.

“Was he at the—you fucking _danced_ with him, Parkinson. Twice. You caught him looking down the front of your dress and when he tried to apologize you said—” He breaks off, laughter finally escaping, a chunk of disheveled black hair sticking up from his forehead. “You said—you said that ‘ _looking’s half the point’_ and when he asked—” Potter laughs harder. “—when he asked what the other half was, you just—you told him— _‘getting **caught** , obviously’—_and I thought—he looked so _scandalized_ —”

She chooses not to examine _why_ , exactly, she feels so unaccountably _stung_ by Potter’s amusement; he’s said far worse to her, after all.

“Mm,” she hums, conversational, “you must have been paying _quite_ close attention to me to catch all of that, Potter. Habit of yours?”

He stops laughing.

Pansy fucking _relishes_ the embarrassed red blush that creeps up the side of his neck.

“So—Colin was at the wedding,” he says, clumsily flicking the rim of his mug and steadily avoiding her gaze. “We can…establish that.”

She rolls her eyes.

“Fine, but can we establish a _motive_? Wasn’t he practically the _founder_ of your pathetic little fan club when we were in school?”

“There wasn’t a _fan club_ , Christ—”

“ _Furthermore_ , if we were _dancing_ together—which, for the record, I only _partially_ remember—it doesn’t seem like he has anything against _me_ , either,” she says. “Beyond the usual, at least.”

He exhales noisily.

“The usual?”

She tightens her jaw and stares out at an ancient red-and-gold dartboard hanging from the far wall of the pub.

“Yes,” she sneers, “the _usual_. As in—‘ _Pansy Parkinson is such a traitorous Slytherin slag and she should’ve been locked up in Azkaban for what she did to Harry Potter at the end of the war and also never, ever let out again so that she can permanently quit tainting proper wizarding society with her presence’_ —surely you’ve heard it before.”

He looks surprised, she thinks with no small measure of bitterness. How fucking _lovely_ for him.

“That…doesn’t really sound like anything Colin would say.”

“Not out loud, maybe.”

Potter glances at the bartender and motions towards their empty glasses.

“Er—motive, then,” he says, tone troubled. “Colin—his brother died in the final battle, which…he could blame me for. In theory.”

“But not in practice.”

He furrows his brow.

“So—you _don’t_ think Colin has anything to do with this?”

She yawns into her hand.

“I didn’t _say_ that.”

“You’re not really _saying_ anything,” he retorts, frustration bleeding into his voice. “You’re acting like…like there’s no _urgency_ to figuring out who—”

“Ah, yes, because there’s so much _urgency_ in hanging around a _shitty pub_ drinking even _shittier beer_ and not calling Granger like I said we should _four hours ago—_ ”

“You’re _complaining_ about being here? Really? Isn’t this like your natural habitat?”

She shoots him a simpering smile.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she coos, “are there any third-string quidditch players around for me to offer blowjobs to? That’s usually the deciding factor.”

His expression hardens.

“Thought they didn’t have enough _stamina_ for you.”

She gives him a deliberately exaggerated once-over through the fringe of her lashes.

“Who needs _stamina_ when you’ve got _alcohol_ , isn’t that right, Potter?”

He shuts his eyes and slumps backwards in his chair with a beleaguered, long-suffering sigh.

“Fine. I get it. We’re—we’re _here_ —at this pub—because I have a tendency to…” he hedges.

“Overreact?” she asks sweetly.

He picks up his beer but doesn’t take a sip.

“I can be impulsive,” he admits, running his fingers through the condensation seeping down the side of his mug. “Hermione—she says I’m more _reckless_ than anything, but I got so used to—to being in situations where _hesitating_ meant a lot of people, y’know, _dying_ …it’s—right, yeah, so—so my first instinct when I saw Colin’s flat was to call Ron, get a team of aurors down there, alert the—”

“Make a spectacle of yourself, basically.”

His answering grin is pained and a bit sardonic.

“Yeah. Basically.” He swallows a mouthful of beer and then sniffs. “Hermione—after the war, after I’d left auror training—she made me promise that I’d stop…doing that. Said I needed a _thing_ —like a routine—something to keep me from—”

“Overreacting.”

“Right. Yeah. That.”

“So…you hang around shitty pubs and drink even shittier beer and that’s your _thing_? How _pedestrian_ , God.”

“Fuck, no,” he snorts. “This was just—convenient. Plus, it’s muggle, and it’s a little—”

“Revolting,” she supplies helpfully.

“—and it seemed like a good enough hiding place to lay low while we sort out—everything.”

She sips her tequila; it’s not as smooth as what she’s used to drinking, and it burns her taste buds as it passes across the back of her tongue.

“Not a lot of point in hiding, though,” she muses.

He looks skeptical.

“What d’you mean?”

She digs her fingernail into a soft spot of moist, dark wood on the edge of the table.

“I _mean_ that the responsible party—or _parties_ , whatever—they clearly already have at least _some_ idea of where we’re going and what we’re doing,” she reasons. “They left your note around the time that you—presumably—normally get up for breakfast, and they waited to deliver _mine_ until after I’d let you into my house—”

“ _Parties_ —what are you—”

“—they also _knew_ we would go to Creevey, and they had enough of an advance warning that they were able to make _three_ different locations look like crime scenes. They’re either already watching us—”

“—why d’you think there’s more than one—”

“—or are familiar enough with our daily lives that they can logically predict our next steps with a really fucking _uncanny_ amount of precision. Take your pick. Both are creepy.”

He blinks.

“You haven’t told me something,” he says stupidly. “I feel like—yeah, no, you _definitely_ went from A to M to fucking Z while completely _skipping_ the rest of the bloody alphabet.”

She pouts.

“Did I?”

He frowns.

“I don’t—you’ve been with me all day. I don’t understand. You shouldn’t know anything that I don’t, not unless—”

“Oh, my _God,_ am I _actually_ going to have to spell it out for you?” she interrupts, exasperated. “Do you need me to draw you a fucking picture, too, or will just using _incredibly_ small words be sufficient?”

He narrows his eyes.

“The guy on the train?” he tries, and she can see how his knuckles turn white as his grip briefly tightens around the handle of his mug. “He—was one of them? He wasn’t…you weren’t…he was, what, _threatening_ you?”

She feigns shock.

“Well _done_ , Potter, I honestly thought it would take you much longerto figure that out.”

His lips twitch, and the tension breaks.

“You thought I would _overreact_ if you told me earlier, didn’t you?”

“You _would_ have.”

“Not necessarily.”

“You would’ve if I’d told you what he said.”

He goes almost preternaturally still.

“Yeah? What did he say?” he asks with visibly forced nonchalance.

She winks at him, mostly to be aggravating, and coils a strand of hair around her fingertip.

“If you’re a _very good boy_ , maybe I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

He chucks a lemon wedge at her head.

She thinks he might miss on purpose.

 

* * *

 

**_1:15 am_ **

“Why…” he starts to ask, voice slightly slurred. He shakes his head. He tries again. “Why have you…”

“Jesus, spit it _out_ , Potter, nine of our closest friends have probably already been kidnapped, we don’t have all night.”

He drags his hand over his mouth and she thinks she can see him half-smiling into his palm.

“You—you made an effort,” he says haltingly. “With Hermione, I mean. When her and Malfoy—you went out of your way to…maybe not be her _friend_ , not at first, but you were definitely less...”

“Less of a cunt?” she interjects dryly.

His half-smile flares into a full-fledged grin and her stomach—the fucking traitor—begins to actually _flutter_.

“Yeah,” he replies, peering into his now-empty glass. “But not to _me_. You kept treating me like…well, like you still treat me. And—actually, no—I think—I think you got _worse_ around then, now that I—”

She bites her lip.

“I had a reason to be nice to Granger,” she says. “Draco…Draco is just about the only thing I have left from when my life wasn’t—well, what it is now—and I knew that Granger—it’s like I said earlier, Potter. Granger is Draco’s _exception_. He will _always_ choose her. Being nice—”

“Or just less of a cunt,” Potter puts in.

“—I had a _reason_ to do it,” she finishes archly. “I’ve never had a reason to be nice to you. _You’ve_ never had a reason to be nice to me. We aren’t nice to _each other_. It isn’t like it’s one-sided.”

He looks at her appraisingly, green eyes glassy and dark hair damp with sweat; it’s warm in the pub, has been for hours, and as fuzzy as her vision is around the edges, there’s a pleasant sort of _stillness_ to her thoughts—normally so tangled and jumbled and frantic—that she knows she hasn’t felt for ages.

“So—if I was… _nice_ to you—”

“Or just less of a cunt.”

“—then you’d be nice to me, is what you’re saying,” he concludes, stretching his arm out over the back of the chair next to his. “Which is really very interesting, because—”

“That isn’t what I said.”

“—because if you _recall_ , Parkinson, I have already _been_ nice to you.”

She uses her elbow to prop her chin up.

“How do you figure?”

He leans forward, halfway across the table and most of the way into her personal space.

“ _Last night_ ,” he says triumphantly. “I was _quite_ nice to you last night.”

She tilts her head in his direction, quirking her lips.

“We exchanged _orgasms_ , Potter, not friendship bracelets.”

He groans, and then chuckles, and then holds his index finger up in front of her face, as if he’s preparing to make a valid, highly exaggerated point—but he wavers, just barely, and she’s close enough to see how his pupils contract and expand, how his breathing stalls and his nostrils flare before he speaks again—

“Sometimes you call me Harry,” he murmurs, swallowing as he drags the callused pad of his finger down the slope of her cheek.

Her skin, she thinks blearily, has never felt so soft.

“And sometimes you call me Pansy. What—”

He reaches her mouth, grazing the gentle bow of her upper lip.

“I like it,” he confesses, gaze fixed on the slow, _slow_ glide of his finger along her chin, her jaw, her throat. “When you call me Harry.”

He scrapes his thumbnail against her collarbone.

“I only do it to irritate you,” she whispers, voice trembling.

He doesn’t smile, not exactly, but his expression is intriguingly wistful as he traces the neckline of her camisole.

“Wonder what it means, then, that it does the opposite,” he says. “Wonder what it means…you’re Pansyin my head, y’know, have been for awhile, actually, which is— _strange_ , right? I mean—we don’t—we _aren’t—_ Pansy, Pansy, _Pansy—_ ”

And then she inhales— _sharply_ , like a razor blade has been pierced right through the meat of her lungs—and the movement causes her chest to heave, causes the topmost curves of her breasts to brush against the flat of his wrist, and she startles and she shivers and she _understands_ , she understands what he means about _liking_ when she calls him Harry, because her name on his tongue is lilting and languorous and she feels the repetition of the syllables like a _caress_ , she does, feels the consonants pulse and the vowels slide against and around and _inside_ her body, God, and it’s frightening and it’s exhilarating and it’s fucking _intimate_ and—no—no— _no_ —

“You’re drunk, Potter,” she says thickly.

He catches his lower lip between his teeth.

“I’m a lot more than drunk, _Pansy_.”

It takes virtually all of the courage she possesses to look up and meet his eyes—green, green, _green_ eyes, the kind of green that would be haunting if it weren’t so beautiful—and the weight of the space between them, the weight of the _words_ between them—it comes rushing back, crippling and crushing and fucking _gravity-defying_ , and she knows, with near absolute certainty, that she can’t do this with him.

Not again.

Not like this.

“And I’m a lot more than _Pansy_ ,” she tells him, chair scraping back as she gets to her feet; she’s wobbly, off-balance, somewhat lightheaded, but she isn’t sure that it’s entirely because of the alcohol. “Potter.”

He ducks his chin and huffs out a small, rueful laugh.

“Yeah. You are.”

She tugs at his arm and gestures for him to stand up.

“Come on,” she says crisply, leading him out of the pub. “You can sleep in my guest room. We’ll deal with—everything—in the morning. Tomorrow’s Monday—my housekeeper brings me lavender scones on Mondays.”

He stumbles over the curb, sneakers slipping against wet asphalt.

“Er—why is that relevant?”

She offers him a sly smile.

“Because,” she practically purrs, “I _like_ lavender scones, Potter. Do keep up.”

 

* * *

 


	8. i'll hold my breath

* * *

 

**_April 23, 2001_ **

**_5:30 am_ **

When Pansy wakes up, her bedroom is bathed in the eerie, grey-purple light of early dawn.

She blinks at her partially open curtains, rustling faintly with a damp, not entirely unpleasant sort of breeze; and then she rolls over, stretches out her arms, yawns up at the ceiling and wonders why she feels so curiously, _cautiously_ optimistic. It isn’t normal for her, and it certainly isn’t sensible. It doesn’t quite fit right, either, not on her bones and not beneath her skin, and she can’t help but think that it’s because—well, it’s because she isn’t _used_ to it, isn’t used to having someone like Potter on her side, protecting her and fighting for her and even if it’s just out of necessity—

It’s strange.

It’s suspicious.

It’s _strangely suspicious_.

She almost scoffs at the absurdity of her thoughts, but she’s registering the warm, heavy, utterly _out of place_ body next to hers before she can catch enough breath to.

And her scream sticks in her throat—

Potter.

 _Harry_ .

He’s in her house, in her room, in her _bed_ , hair mussed and glasses askew and he’s watching her, gaze intent and brow furrowed and expression so uncharacteristically, unbelievably _guarded_ that she nearly pinches herself to make sure she isn’t fucking dreaming.

“Oh, my _God_ ,” she half-shrieks. “What the _fuck_ , how did you—what are you—oh, my _God_.”

His face clears.

His eyes brighten.

The bastard fucking _laughs_.

“Morning, Pansy,” he says, voice still rough with sleep.

And she fights off an instinctive, impossible shiver-shudder at the smug, liquid vibrato of her name on his lips—but _no_ , not just on his lips, no—it’s her name on his lips like _this_ , surrounded by rumpled sheets and the slightly ethereal cocoon of the very early morning, when the rest of the world isn’t up and about and ruining everything, yes, it’s her name on his lips like this, intimate and soft, like _this_ —

She smacks him on the shoulder with the heel of her palm.

“ _Morning, Pansy_ ,” she mimics sarcastically. “ _Fancy a wake-up call that could inspire the Bloody Baron to reconsider his lurking methods?”_

He snorts, feigning indignation, and she blindly reaches behind her back, rummaging around for a spare pillow.

“Not my fault you _snore_ like one of Hagrid’s dragons and didn’t _hear me come in_ —”

She cuts him off with a firm swing of her pillow to his jaw, knocking his glasses off and ruffling his hair.

“I do not _snore_ ,” she retorts crisply.

He stares at her for a long, _long_ moment, and then he’s tackling her down to the mattress and she isn’t doing a fucking thing to stop him and it’s surreal in a lot of ways but mostly in how it _isn’t_ , because his knees are bracketing her thighs and his hips are hovering above hers, _waiting_ , it seems like, to rock and press and push and it occurs to her that this is new, this position and this feeling, both, and she wants to push pause and she wants to examine it all and she wants to figure out why his eyes are so hypnotically, magnetically _green_ —

She shifts.

He swallows.

“Pansy…” he trails off.

“Can you even see me right now?” she asks, whisper wavering. “Without your glasses?”

He smiles, sort of, and licks his lips.

“You’re a bit blurry,” he admits in a low murmur, just as he leans down to kiss her.

And Pansy—

She softens.

She _melts_.

She kisses him back, yes, but she does it quietly— _slowly_ —just for her, just for _them_ , just for how their lips brush and their tongues graze and time seems to stretch and wrinkle and _rip_ , yes, because she isn’t in a hurry and he isn’t going to leave and what she’s experiencing—God, it’s _different_ , it’s exactly the opposite of how it had been at the wedding, it isn’t furious and it isn’t frenetic and it isn’t like quicksand in her blood—

No.

 _No_ .

She isn’t going to make this kiss and this moment and this _feeling_ —she isn’t going to make it about what it _isn’t_ , no, not when she can make it about what it _is_ —

It’s gentle.

It’s so fucking gentle.

And it’s hesitant and it’s tentative and it’s honest and she doesn’t—she doesn’t know what to _do_ with it, doesn’t know what to do with the sudden understanding that she doesn’t have to _excuse this_ , doesn’t have to rationalize it as an impulse she couldn’t control or a mistake she knew better than to make. It’s hers. It’s his. It’s _theirs_.

Because he’s slipping her knickers down her legs and the weight of his palm over her cunt is a revelation.

Because his chest is firm and her skin is tingling and his mouth is hot against the column of throat.

Because sex is sex is sex until it isn’t.

Because the tension in her muscles is _beautiful_ as it spirals deeper and coils tighter and she exhales when he slides two callused fingers inside of her and strums his thumb in a clumsy half-circle around and around her clit and her knees are bent and his cock is semi-hard against her inner thigh and she’s clutching at her sheets like they’re going to _save her_ , like she’s drowning, _drowning,_ and she might be, she thinks hazily, she absolutely fucking might be because each and every breath she takes is _short_ , stalled and stuttering, and she’s arching her back and her hips are hitching up and down and up and when she comes—when she _comes_ , her orgasm isn’t fast, isn’t like a sucker punch to the base of her spine, no, it’s a gradual roll and a steady ascent and it isn’t fierce like lightning but it _is_ bright like the sun—

“ _Harry_ ,” she gasps.

 

* * *

 

**_8:00 am_ **

The aftermath is—

The aftermath is _peculiar_.

She isn’t sure what she’d been expecting to happen, not truly, but it certainly hadn’t been for Potter, for _Harry_ , to follow her into the shower and bicker good-naturedly with her about the temperature of the water and the placement of the faucet and the shampoo suds she flicks into his face when he tries to slyly reach around the soap dispenser to tickle her waist. He ducks his chin and grins at the tiled floor when she teases him about his hair—always a mess—and she feels her cheeks turn pink from something other than the steam in the air when he drops an absent, haphazard kiss onto the curve of her bare shoulder.

Pansy suspects she’s being _flirted with_.

By Potter.

Harry Potter.

It’s fucking bizarre.

It’s fucking _easy_.

And there’s an exhilarating sense of _anticipation_ hurtling her at breakneck speed towards something she can’t quite identify, isn’t quite _ready_ to identify, and it’s disarming and it’s unsettling and it’s rather remarkable, too, overwhelming in the best way, the most _intoxicating_ way—

Because she isn’t alone.

She doesn’t know what to make of that.

 

* * *

 

**_9:15 am_ **

They eventually go downstairs.

Out of habit, she grabs a new packet of hand-rolled cigarettes from the chesterfield in the entry hall; Potter glances at them with an inscrutable quirk of his brow and then shakes his head, holding up a carton of eggs and wedge of white cheddar, the origins of which she’s summarily fucking baffled by.

“Breakfast?” he asks, nodding at her rarely-used stove.

She chews her lower lip and fiddles with the cardboard edge of her cigarette packet.

“You…cook?”

He looks bemused.

“Yeah? Doesn’t everyone?”

She crosses her arms over her lower abdomen.

“No,” she drawls, “not _everyone does_.”

He studies her for a minute, the stretched-out collar of his t-shirt leaving the sharp, jutting line of his clavicle exposed.

“Right,” he says, squinting at the gleaming copper skillet her housekeeper’s left out—probably for aesthetic purposes, since the woman _has to know_ by now that Pansy’s perception of culinary excellence relies pretty heavily on the case of magnum champagne bottles sitting in the back of her pantry. “Right. Well— _I_ cook, and _you’re_ about to learn.”

Pansy blanches.

She doesn’t put up much a fight, though.

He gives her a sleek silver measuring cup and a ceramic canister of flour and she skewers him with an incredulous glare even as she follows his instructions and produces a passably competent pancake batter. He cracks eggs and whisks in heavy cream and then stands behind her, arms on either side of her body, voice gravelly in his chest and rumbling straight through hers as he describes how to dice an onion, shows her how to maneuver the knife and flick her wrist and it isn’t unlike doing magic, really, and so she relaxes, and she gingerly flips pancakes when he tells her to, and if the results are imperfect—

Well, she’s new to it all.

She imagines there’s somewhat of a learning curve.

 

* * *

 

**_11:30 am_ **

She convinces him to leave the dishes in the sink and then brings up the topic they’ve been skirting around—flat-out fucking _ignoring_ , honestly—for the great majority of the morning.

“We need to call Granger,” she says, head lolling back into the smooth brown leather of her sofa.

He grimaces.

“Yeah.”

Neither of them move.

“Yesterday, on the train—it was the waiter from the wedding,” she blurts out, hooking her ankle over Harry’s on the coffee table. “His name is Isaac. He said…I’m fairly sure he’s been following me for a while. He knew—he knew what to _do_ to…upset me. He was hired. By more than one person.”

Harry goes still, and then carefully turns towards her.

“What he did to upset you—” he starts.

“Is irrelevant to this conversation.”

“Then it’s personal, yeah?”

“ _Yeah_.”

“How many people know about it?”

She stiffens.

“Enough that it would be an inconclusive investigation.”

“How _many_ , Pansy?”

She scowls.

“Draco knows. Presumably Granger. The Carrows.” She grits her teeth and curls her toes inside of her socks, where Potter can’t see. “Theo. Theo was there when it—Theo saw. What happened. And he wouldn’t use it against me, alright? Not for this. He _wouldn’t_.”

Harry stays silent as he appraises her, and she loathes the change in the atmosphere—in the _space_ —abruptly looming between them, loathes that they’re already reverting back to the status quo where he’s eternally wary, skeptical, _suspicious_ of her and her motives, and she’s defensive and angry and _awful_ , spiteful, incapable of her customary emotional detachment and _bitter_ about it, about what he does to her—

“We should call Hermione,” he mumbles.

 

* * *

 

**_11:45 am_ **

It goes badly.

It goes _wrong_.

Granger picks up on the fourth ring, and Harry greets her with a warm, subdued sort of familiarity that serves as a potent reminder to Pansy of just how ludicrously long they’ve been friends.

And she listens to Harry explain their indiscretion at the wedding— _had a lot to drink, y’know, things got a bit…out of hand_ —and she listens to Harry explain the photographs— _same envelopes, same handwriting, one seems like straightforward blackmail and the other…doesn’t_ —and she listens to Harry explain about Creevey’s disappearance and about Isaac’s presence on the train and how they’re not quite sure what to do now and having it all laid out like that, condensed and subsequently packaged into a neat little story—it makes Pansy’s heart fucking _break_.

“What do you think?” Harry asks Granger—

And Pansy has to close her eyes, has to steel her spine, has to fix her posture and undo her frown and very resolutely _not think_ about what’s about to be said.

Because she knows.

She _knows_.

“She wants to talk to you,” Harry says to Pansy.

She shrugs.

She takes the phone.

She’s numb—and it’s all so terribly, terribly _predictable_ at this point.

“Pansy?” Granger says, audibly uncomfortable. “You know, don’t you? You know that it’s him?”

Pansy clenches her jaw.

“None of us know that, Granger. None of us _know_ anything. That’s why we called you.”

“It’s just—it’s so…so _personal_ , isn’t it? And Theo—well, he has a good enough reason to carry a grudge, I suppose—”

“A _good enough reason_?” Pansy interjects harshly, barking out a laugh that’s more scathing than it is humorous. “Oh, well, _obviously_ if the dirty, no-good Slytherin has a _Gryffindor-approved reason_ to stage his own kidnapping and _blackmail me_ and use—use a _nobody_ to bloody _terrorize me_ on a fucking _train_ —obviously, yes, _obviously_ I must know. Obviously.”

“Pansy. That isn’t—”

“God, is that all we’ll ever be to the lot of you? _Enemies_? People who—who can’t be trusted? You don’t _know_ him, Granger, you never bloody bothered to _get_ to know him—”

“Because he was _horrible_ to you! He was manipulative and—and _cruel_ , and he _blamed you_ for something that was fundamentally _not your fault_ , Pansy, you can’t possibly—”

“And I _handled that_ , didn’t I? I ended it on _my terms_ and he fucked off to America and now, what, he’s suddenly decided to _exact revenge_? It’s—it’s ridiculous. He _wouldn’t_.”

“This isn’t about him being a _Slytherin_ , Pansy,” Granger says, sounding tired and tense.

“A Death Eater, then.”

The phone speaker crackles as Granger clears her throat.

“I’m married to _Draco_ ,” she says, rather curtly.

Pansy snorts.

“And I’m _fucking_ Potter—what’s your point? What’s the _difference_?”

Before Granger can reply—furiously, Pansy thinks acidly, _blankly_ , Granger would have replied _furiously_ —Harry is snatching the phone out of her grasp and slamming it into the receiver, his expression rapidly alternating between rage and frustration and confusion, like he can’t decide which one he should stick with and that’s—that’s _hilarious_ , it is, it’s hilarious and it’s maddening and she _can’t_ —

“That wasn’t fair,” Potter finally says, tone low and slightly strained. “To Hermione, or to—to _you_. Stop lashing out because you don’t like what you’re hearing.”

“Nothing’s fucking _fair_ , Potter—I assumed the Boy Who Lived might actually _get_ that,” she hisses with a sneer, turning on her heel and rushing up the stairs and pretending that she _can’t_ hear Potter call out her name—

She can’t.

She _can’t_.

She doesn’t understand why he doesn’t _see_ that, why he seems to think that she _wants_ to be who she is and _how_ she is and why he sometimes looks at her like she’s a stranger and why he sometimes looks at her like she’s a _problem_ and why why _why_ he’d climbed into her bed earlier that morning and let her get so incredibly fucking _lost_ in his eyes and his mouth and the utter implausibility of what had felt, for a brief, tantalizing moment, like fate was finally plucking the opening harp-string chords of her happy ending—

And she _can’t_.

She can’t explain that and she can’t explain the chaotic sort of desperation currently churning—sloppy and scared and _slow_ —in the pit of her stomach and she can’t, she can’t, she can’t stop wondering when it all got so fucking _complicated_ , whether this sharp, stabbing ache that she has only ever associated with Potter—with Harry—whether it had been inside of her all along, dormant like a virus on the pastel tissue-paper cusp of her veins, whether she’d been ignoring it or just fucking _ignorant_ of it, because she can’t she can’t she can’t dismiss the trembling of her lips or the quavering of her vocal chords and _Potter is right_ , Potter is right because Granger is right and Granger is _always_ right, always, and none of this—

 _None_ of this—

It doesn’t make _sense_ , it doesn’t, and her thoughts are unraveling and _she_ is unraveling and her mind is a whirlwind and it’s spinning and it’s going straight to the places she doesn’t fucking want it to, not again, not _again_ , it’s going to those last harrowing days at Hogwarts, to the scar on her neck and the whisper-slick sounds of the Carrows’ footsteps against marble and flagstone and the thick, expensive imported carpet in the Slytherin common room—and it’s going to Theo—Theo— _Theo,_ the Theo who’d always talked to her like she _mattered_ and kissed her like she was _precious_ and told her that he loved her and _meant_ it, or at least thought he did, except as soon as he’d said the words something quiet and small and dreadful had _twisted_ in their relationship and she hadn’t been able to bring herself to touch him, never again, hadn’t been able to do much of anything other than look for ways to drown her uncertainties and suffocate her doubts and had she done this had she _caused_ this had she broken them and broken him and broken _herself_ —

She can’t.

She can’t.

She—

She can’t.

She enters her bedroom and she stands still for a grating, God-awful second that _splinters_ —hurts—burns into her skin—and then she’s blinking, blinking, darting into her closet and locking the door behind her and staring at her shoes and her skirts and her _life_ and her vision is blurry and her cheeks are damp and there’s a curious sort of heat creeping across the nape of her neck and her breath is rattling in her lungs and she’s biting down on her fist to muffle a sob and _oh_ —

She _can’t_.

She cries.

She cries.

She cannot seem to stop.

 

* * *

 


	9. sink or swim

* * *

 

 

**_April 23, 2001_ **

**_4:00 pm_ **

An hour passes.

And then another.

And then _another_.

Harry leaves her alone, and Pansy’s grateful for the reprieve—for the freedom to sit and stare and _stall_ as the tear tracks on her cheeks begin to crystallize and the pulsing knot of tension in her stomach begins to unfurl.

She looks around.

A handbag she’d bought at a muggle boutique in London is resting precariously on the edge of the shelf directly to her left; it’s a rich tawny brown, calfskin stitching immaculate and gleaming copper hardware hand-crafted. There’s still a price-tag tucked into the front pocket. She thinks, glumly, that she should pair it with something white—something innocent. Something lacy and florid that would remind her of the doilies on her grandmother’s breakfast table. Minimal makeup. Perhaps her hair in a braid; a _nest_ of braids, even. Like a medieval virgin. The _Prophet_ would run a blind gossip column about the snake who’d shed her scales—traded in her fishnet tights and scandalous past for Waterford crystal and stockings the very same shade of beige as Millicent Bulstrode’s lipstick.

Pansy’s nostrils flare.

An electric pink mini-dress is crumpled on the floor by her feet; it’s strapless and skin-tight and she remembers that the hemline is dramatically asymmetrical and barely skims the tops of her thighs. It smells like spilled vodka and expensive cigarettes—imports, maybe. She’d worn it to a wine bar in Camden and hadn’t bothered to drink a single drop of wine. Cormac McLaggen had been there. _Harry_ had been there. She’d rolled her eyes at his frumpy blue sweater and he’d scowled for a minute too long at the cut of her dress and she’d purposely ordered an Italian appetizer just to watch his neck flush red and his grip tighten dangerously around the stem of his wine glass— _‘ **Krum’s** in Verona with Ginny now, isn’t that right, Granger?_ ’—and Harry had called her a tart when she’d blown a kiss at McLaggen and she’d toyed prettily with the serrated slope of her butter knife while cooing _‘well, tarts are made to be **eaten** , aren’t they, Potter?’_ and Draco had knocked over Granger’s bottle of Chardonnay and Weasley had choked on a bite of beef tartare and Potter’s gaze had seared and then _slammed_ into her with all the force of a stray stunner and she’d—she’d been fucking oblivious, hadn’t she?

She startles as footsteps sound from behind her; from her bedroom. They reach the closet door. They stop.

And time seems like it either speeds up or slows down—and she’s _aware_ that she can’t hide forever, aware that eventually clarity will slither like a cat burglar into the dimly lit corners of her brain and illuminate _precisely_ how badly she’d fucked everything up with Granger—with _Harry_ —

The ensuing knock echoes like a gunshot.

She ignores it.

Ignores _him_.

She already knows she won’t last long.

“Pansy,” she hears, and wishes that she hadn’t. “Pansy, _please_.”

And she thinks about the night before, the night they’d spent at that seedy muggle pub with the awful lighting and the tacky seats and she thinks about how he’d confessed that she’d _always_ been Pansy to him, just Pansy, and she thinks about kissing him before the sun was properly shining and how she’d felt like there was something _stirring_ between them, something that she didn’t want to hide behind and didn’t want to lie about and didn’t want to shield herself from and she presses her lips together and she collapses backwards into the door and she _aches_ , she aches everywhere, she aches for who she could have been if she’d been born someone else and she aches for who she could have been if she’d gone to school in fucking _France_ like her father had wanted and she aches for who she could have been if she’d _kept her mouth shut_ and been stronger been braver been _better_ and it’s that—that _thought_ —that _memory_ —that has her _opening_ her mouth and whispering—like it’s a _secret_ , like she _shouldn’t be_ —

“Harry.”

There’s a pause.

“Will you open the door?”

“No.”

“Please?”

“Jesus, it’s a fucking _muggle lock_ —I’m sure you can figure it out for yourself.”

Another pause.

“I wouldn’t—never mind. Are you…hungry?”

“Really? This again?”

“I don’t mean—it’s not a _criticism_ , it’s just…a question. About your—appetite.”

“My appetite is _splendid_.”

Silence. She hears a clunking sort of thump, and then the door frame rattles a bit. _God_. Is he _sitting down_?

“Staying for tea?” she simpers.

“Er. Alright,” he replies, more loudly.

More silence. She yawns, even as her scalp prickles with irritation. _Defensive_ irritation.

“Can I ask you something?” Harry finally says.

“It’s not like you need my _permission_.”

“No, I—whatever. Fine. What’d you think of Ginny? When she was—y’know. Around?”

Pansy rubs the heels of her palms together and squints at the lacquered enamel panels of her jewelry box—a glittering snow-capped depiction of _The Winter Palace in Winter, 1885_. A family heirloom. It’s the ugliest thing she owns. She’s never been able to bring herself to toss it.

“I thought that her eyeliner was _horribly_ uneven and that she was much too fucking good for you, if you must know. _Why?_ Worried I’m going to get in the way of your elaborate and no-doubt idiotic plans to get her back?”

 _More_ silence. And then—

“Ginny was right to leave me.”

Pansy wrinkles her nose.

“ _What?_ ”

“Ginny was…she was what I thought I _deserved_ at the end of the war, like—like a _reward_ , or something. It wasn’t—”

“You sure about that, Potter? Because you sound an awful lot like you’re regurgitating that— self-critical muggle psychology _bullshit_ that Granger tried to use on me.”

Harry snorts.

“Hermione has a tendency to, er, _verbalize_ people’s feelings for them, yeah, but—the Ginny thing—I think Hermione was _right_. I wasn’t—I _haven’t been_ —I was in a bad place after the war ended, y’know?”

Pansy goes still.

“Is that supposed to make you _special?_ Because it doesn’t.”

“I jumped into a relationship with Ginny because she was…she was _easy_ , and uncomplicated, and…I knew I’d never have to die for her. Have to make that sacrifice again. She was what I thought the world _owed me_ after eighteen years of…well, of shit.”

“Are Gryffindors normally so grim? _Jesus_.”

“Yeah,” he says wryly. “And I loved her, I did, but Ginny—Ginny deserves better than…than _how_ I loved her. Ginny deserves someone who loves her because of who she is, not what she represents, and—”

“So do you,” Pansy interjects before she instruct herself not to.

“ _What_?”

“Nothing. It was an—owl.”

“No,” he says, slowly. _Slyly_. “You said—”

“I had an _attack_. Of the vapors. It was _nothing_.”

“Didn’t sound like nothing to _me_.”

“So you’re deaf _and_ blind, good news all around—”

“Pansy.”

“ _Harry_.”

“It’s okay if you meant it.”

“I rarely _mean_ anything.”

“But it’s okay. If you do. I—agree. That you should—also. Have that. What you said.”

And Pansy is so very _tired_ of crying, tired of the tightness around her mouth and the salt-slick around her eyes; but she finds that she rather _wants_ to cry just then, wants to give in to the heavy, tangled mess of emotions—inappropriate and inexcusable and _impossible_ , all of them—that’s built up in her lungs like a chest cold over the past few days.

She doesn’t, of course.

But she _wants_ to.

It’s an incredibly strange sensation.

“Of course I should have that,” she sniffs, dragging her nails down the looping pattern of the woodgrain at the bottom of the door. “I’m fantastic.”

Harry doesn’t respond. She isn’t surprised.

“It’s easier, like this,” she says abruptly. _Awkwardly_.

“What is?”

“Talking about...I don’t know. _Talking_. It’s easier when I don’t have to see you.”

“Well, I _have_ been _Witch Weekly’s_ ‘Hottest Bachelor Under 40’ for two years in a row—”

“With such _formidable_ competition, too—have you _seen_ the Weasley who’s obsessed with dragons? I always vote for him.”

“That’s— _really?_ Charlie?”

“Mm. Jealous, Potter?”

“Oh, piss _off_.”

“That’s a firm yes, then?”

“It’s your bloody turn, y’know.”

“For what?”

“Er—talking.”

“About my feelings?”

“Sure, yeah.”

She hums, deceptively casual.

“That’s easy enough—Theo rescued me from certain doom during the war, told me he loved me during a _very_ romantic nine-course dinner in Paris, and then watched as I systematically destroyed our relationship. The end. Would you like to psychoanalyze me like Granger did?”

Harry groans.

“You’re so—”

“Concise? To the point?”

“ _No_ ,” he retorts. “So…he—Nott—he told you he loved you and you—what? Thought you didn’t deserved to be loved and pushed him away? Is that what Hermione—”

She makes a face.

“ _What_? No. That’s ridiculous.”

Harry chuckles, although it sounds a bit strangled.

“Then…what?”

Pansy sets her jaw and eyes a pastel lavender, cable-knit cardigan hanging from a hook on the far wall.

“Theo—I didn’t love Theo, not the way he loved me,” she says, haltingly. “And I knew that, obviously, and I suspect that he did as well.”

“Er. Alright?”

“So,” she continues, “when he said it—when he looked at me and said, _‘I love you, Pansy’_ —it was…this _expectation_ that suddenly manifested, wasn’t it? This expectation that one day, I’d have to say it back, or I’d have to mean it— _properly_ mean it, and—”

“And you rarely _mean_ anything,” Harry interjects, dryly.

“Yes. That’s exactly—yes.”

“And you—what? Strung him along? Lied? And now he’s bla— _bitter_?”

Pansy hesitates.

Fights the urge to rip at her cuticles.

Glares petulantly at a sleek violet cocktail dress.

Because Harry being careful with her— _uncharacteristically_ careful, treating her like she’s _fragile_ , like she can’t fucking _handle_ the word ‘blackmail’, like she’s liable to fucking _fall apart_ again, again, _again_ —it’s infuriating in a way she doesn’t expect.

And it makes her mad.

It makes her _honest_.

“I stopped having sex with him, actually. For a year. I didn’t touch him for a year.”

“You—”

“Yes.”

“ _You_ —”

“Yes. I picked fights. I cried—I cried _a lot_ , and I let him think it was because of him. I let everyone think it was because of him.”

“Hermione said—”

“Hermione was wrong.”

Harry doesn’t immediately answer, and Pansy can practically pinpoint the moment he connects what she’s saying _now_ to what she’d said before—to what she’d said about the train and the encounter with Isaac and _Theo_ , how insistent she’d been that Theo _wouldn’t do this to her_ —

The atmosphere shifts.

“I…see,” Harry says, something rough and helpless turning his voice to gravel. “And he—was whatever you needed him to be. That’s what you…”

“I needed him to ruin whatever it was we had together, and he did. I needed to be the one to end it, and I was. I needed—”

“Control. You needed control. I get—I understand that.”

Pansy grits her teeth against a sneer—and it doesn’t seem to matter that it would be _her_ sneer, that she wouldn’t have to share it with Potter, with _anyone_ , no, not when mean girls smirked and heroes roared and villains, bullies, enemies; _they_ sneered.

“I didn’t want Theo. I didn’t want him, but I didn’t know how to get _rid_ of him without losing—he _loved me_. He said so. No one else did.”

“That’s…”

“Well, it certainly isn’t a bloody _fairytale_ , is it?” she snaps.

There’s a creaking sound, and she thinks that Harry’s probably turned his body to lean closer to the door, closer to _her_ —and then he speaks and it’s slightly muffled, like his mouth is touching the wood because he’s pressed too far and pushed too _much_ and she can’t help but imagine somewhat wistfully that she can _feel_ his voice, feel the deep, unsure cadence of it trickle down her spine and coat her nerves like a steaming mug of morning chocolate.

“Hermione says that the fairytales those German blokes wrote, the original ones, were actually, y’know, _quite dark_ ,” Harry offers. Clears his throat. “So. Maybe your thing—your thing with Theo—maybe it _was_ a fairytale.”

Pansy considers this.

“Really?” she asks, tone plaintive and uncomfortably small.

“Really. I guess they’re supposed to be, er, _cautionary_ rather than…romantic.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s…nice.”

“And—you know—you know the one where the prince gets turned into a frog?”

Pansy clutches her lower lip between her teeth to stave off a smile.

“And the princess has to kiss him to get him back, yeah—oh, _wait,_ is that meant to dissuade young readers from _bestiality_ , or—”

Harry emits a hacking cough that quickly tapers off into a laugh.

“That’s not—fucking _hell_ , that’s not—in the _original_ story, the frog can’t talk, right, and when she sees him in the garden she—ah—kills him. With a shoe. And a wall. It’s—”

“Spectacularly fucking violent, _clearly_.”

“Pretty violent, yeah.”

“And… _gory._ ”

“That, too.”

“Who does that to a _frog_ , though? Was the princess a _sociopath_?”

“Seems likely, yeah.”

“I mean— _honestly,_ does she have a _torture chamber_ in her dungeon? Does she run off with a _serial killer_ in the sequel?”

“Maybe the Bloody Baron?”

“He wasn’t a _serial killer_ , Potter, just a regular one.”

“He _murdered_ the woman he loved!”

Pansy draws her knees up to her chin.

“That’s a sad story, isn’t it?” she muses, reaching out to toy with the strap of a cherry-red, patent leather Mary-Jane. “But—but I never really thought that he _loved_ her. He couldn’t’ve. You don’t _hurt_ the people you love, especially not like _that_.”

“I don’t think that’s how it works.”

“Murder?”

“What? No— _love_. I don’t think…you can’t just _choose_ how you react to it, can you?”

“Mm. But he wasn’t reacting out of _love_ , he was reacting out of—out of _obsession_. If he’d _loved_ her—it’s irrelevant. He couldn’t have. He was a _Slytherin_.”

There’s a second of incredulous silence.

“Er—what does—no _offense_ , but—what does him being a _Slytherin_ have to do with…anything?”

“I know you think we’re all _consummate evil_ , Potter, but there’s a lot more to us than—than _moral bankruptcy_.”

“I didn’t—”

“Like—we’re loyal. Really _fucking_ loyal. We _protect_ each other. The people we care about. We _have_ to, because no one else will bother. And I know—I know to _you_ , Theo’s just a cheating ex-boyfriend I’m on bad terms with, and him being the _blackmailer_ —it makes sense to you. You called it from the beginning. But it’s more—it’s _more_ than that, it’s more of a betrayal than you can _possibly_ understand, and it’s—” She breaks off, struggles to organize her thoughts, breathes out a shaky, “And the Bloody Baron—if he’d loved her—if he’d _loved_ her—he would _never_ have—wouldn’t have been _able to_ —”

“Greenwich Mean Time,” Harry interrupts, words punctuated with a dull sigh and a muted thud, like he’d dropped his chin and slammed his forehead against the surface of the door.

“What?”

“Greenwich Mean Time,” he repeats, more quietly; almost in a hush. “It’s—it’s the center of the world, isn’t it?”

Pansy swallows.

_Oh._

 

* * *

 


End file.
